


the certain things we lack

by deanpendragon



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, Canon Compliant, Childhood Friends, Established Relationship, Eventual Smut, Family Dynamics, First Love, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, M/M, Plot, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-10-08 05:34:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 89,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10379625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deanpendragon/pseuds/deanpendragon
Summary: His home cracks and festers around him. Kei just wants to make it to graduation.





	1. milk and marble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *drives 6 hours home to my apartment and then IMMEDIATELY sprints to the library to post this*

There’s a crack in the window that, when the blinds are tilted shut, sends a set of gray veins over the cream-colored slats. Sunbeams pound on the glass to get in. They long to pour over him in his bed the same way the light through the balcony doors pours over the carpet in long rectangles, their edges creeping up the rolling desk chair. Kei sits up, his spine rigid. He feels cheated for waking up fifteen minutes before his alarm.

The morning sunlight drives him from his bedroom.

“What in the hell?”

His father slings his cereal bowl across the kitchen floor with an incidental kick. Milk runs to the depressions between white tiles. It seeps into the grout. His mother hadn’t wanted separate tiles; she’d wanted a huge, thick slab of marble or maybe granite, but his father insisted they didn’t actually make floors like that. Kei figures if they do, they’re probably grossly expensive. So the marble kitchen tiles sport grout. His parents alternate cleanings. It isn’t odd to come home and find one or both of them on their hands and knees on the floor like dogs, wielding toothbrushes and orange cardboard cartons of baking soda.

They obsess over this. It’s their favorite distraction.

“If you’re going to act like an animal, you can eat on the floor like one,” says his mother.

“That isn’t necessary.”

Kei’s father slings his blazer over his shoulder and bends down to retrieve the half-empty bowl. Kei pads through the living room. He picks up the spoon from where it lies on the threshold to the kitchen. A small pool of milk lies within it. Kei sets it on the high counter with a muted clack _._

Someone will mop it up by the end of the day but for now, they simply step around the milky splashes. His father sits at the kitchen table opposite his mother. Despite her assertion, she doesn’t object. Kei takes the seat adjacent to both of them—the arbitrator's seat. He stares down at his own cereal, bloated and soggy because his mother pours it the instant she wakes up. She smoothes her rolling pin over a heap of cool clay and it stretches out in front of her like a thick, gray placemat.

“It’s too damn hot for fall,” his father accuses, eyes on his phone.

“Autumn,” corrects his mother.

“Fine, autumn.”

Kei pushes his spoon into an inflated grain puff and tells them, “The Autumn Equinox was a week ago today.”

“I remember. We had a half day at work.”

Seemingly satisfied, his father stands. He flicks his thumb across his phone screen once more and slides it into his pocket. He shrugs into his blazer. He leaves it unbuttoned, the way Kei’s mother hates because it makes him look like some American yuppie: arrogantly casual and lucky to be part of any business at all, whether it be toilet sponges or crystal chandeliers.

The mechanical groan of the garage door resounds through the shared wall.

“Half day at work,” mutters Kei’s mother, “and he still wasn’t home for dinner.”

Kei watches the stretch of the clay slab beneath her pin, so malleable from her work that it spreads easily now, almost like liquid. Almost like the way cool milk still grows in puddles across the kitchen floor. Kei isn’t sure if clay is ever supposed to be rolled like that. So thin like that, she won’t be able to make anything from it. Whatever she makes with clay like that will burst to pieces in the kiln like a shrapnel.

________________

  
Secretly, Kei hates meeting Yamaguchi at Shimada Mart before school. It’s out of the way. It makes for too much time in the morning. Mornings should exist merely to lead swiftly into the happenings of afternoons and more importantly evenings, when Kei shakes off the strings of school and sports and scrutiny. A life of evenings sounds ideal.

Yamaguchi leans against the front of the shop with its owner, so Kei lingers on the road. He hovers at the edge of some invisible forcefield while Yamaguchi says whatever it is he says to Shimada and turns on his heel. His steps slap the pavement. He comes to Kei, eager and fascinated like Kei holds out fistfuls of cash.

“Morning,” he calls. “I got you something.”

He swings his bag under his arm to fish through its pockets.

“For little old me?” Kei deadpans.

“God, gross,” laughs Yamaguchi, still fishing, “you sound like a Southern belle.”

“You’re supposed to tell me I’m not little. Or old.”

“You’re not little. And you’re not old,” he responds dutifully.

“Thanks.”

From his bag, Yamaguchi produces a handful of wrapped orange candies. He wards off Kei’s bitching with sweets and pastries and other treats he gets with his discount like some particularly skilled, cavity-ridden wizard. It’s most of the reason Kei agrees to The Great Shimada Mart Detour.

“They only had peach,” Yamaguchi tells him, frowning. His frown deepens when he notices the hard candies have globbed together in a kind of peach-flavored conglomerate of sugar and artificial food dye. “Aw,” he whines.

“How long have they been in your backpack?” Kei wonders.

“Since I first got to work. I didn’t think it’d be this hot out.”

Kei shrugs so his jacket collar unsticks from the back of his neck.

“Hold this for a second.”

He grimaces. “I’ll get all sticky.”

“Hold this for a second,” Yamaguchi presses in the same tone as before, like an audio clip on repeat. Kei takes the orange lump and holds it while Yamaguchi picks off the smallest pieces—two or maybe three hard candies, fused together. He peels away their foiled wrappers. The specimen breaks in two with a snap.

He pops one piece into his mouth and holds the other out to Kei.

“My hands are clean, I swear.”

“I doubt it, but okay.”

Yamaguchi snickers brightly.

They had a ritualistic solution to candy conglomerates when they were small. It consisted of them both holding the candy between their teeth while one of them bites it in two. This way, nobody’s hands got sticky. Kei also got to try and count the masses of freckles splashed over Yamaguchi’s face—an added bonus. It didn’t last a year, though, because Yamaguchi’s twin sister told them they were weird. That’s all it took to sticky-up Yamaguchi’s hands in any kind of melty predicaments moving forward. Kei still despises her, but for more reasons now.

Yamaguchi drops the trash in a nearby bin.

He asks, “How are you, Tsukki?”

“I want to smash my head against that light post.”

“Yeah,” says Yamaguchi, candy clicking against his teeth. “I know what you mean.”

Kei’s own candy tastes bitter. He wants to spit it out.

His shit brain shoves the childlike ritual in his face every time this happens. He can’t remember Kageyama’s jersey number half the time—and it's _one_ —but he remembers Yamaguchi’s blueberry breath and the snap of hard candy between their mouths at the artless age of ten. Yamaguchi thinks about it too, Kei just knows. Maybe that’s why he keeps buying goddamn hard candy.

The trees along the road to school swing to and fro with the wind. Leaves cling stubbornly to their branches, unwilling to accept to the onslaught of autumn. The climate joins their protest. Kei waits for the temperature drop so he can wear scarves and boots without the threat of heat stroke, and so his headphones can double as earmuffs. They’re good for that. Fallen leaves, having accepted their fate, crinkle under Kei and Yamaguchi’s feet as they walk. Yamaguchi zigs and zags to crunch the ones whose edges are crispy and curl toward the sky. Kei approves; when Yamaguchi stomps the particularly noisy ones, it’s pretty satisfying. He leaves obliterated pieces in his wake and they lie still on the concrete, ready to be put together again like a tedious autumnal puzzle.

“Dad said the temperature will plummet next week,” says Yamaguchi.

“I hope.”

Kei makes a mental note to hang his winter jacket on the coat hooks by the front door tonight so it won’t smell like closet.

“Yeah, well, _he_ doesn’t. He hates carrying his thermos around the site. He told Hana he’s gonna put a clip on his tool belt,” Yamaguchi reports, smacking a hand demonstratively on his hip, “so he can— _click!_ —snap the thermos right onto it. Hands free.”

“Oh my god,” says Kei.

“I know. But he was pretty excited about it, so we let him be.”

The bitter candy turns sweet on Kei’s tongue. He presses it to the roof of his mouth before catching it between his canines. Plagued by an oral fixation, Kei chews candies to bits within minutes while Yamaguchi lets his dissolve, trapped between his molars and his cheek, squeezing from them every ounce of manufactured flavor.

“I hear you crunching, Tsukki.”

Yamaguchi’s stare is warm, fond.

“It’s a curse,” Kei tells him.

________________  


  
The crack in the window was not Kei’s fault. There was a medieval special on the television, and Kei blames it.

Kei and Yamaguchi weren’t allowed to watch television at the Tsukishima house without someone there to supervise and once his mother communicated this to Yamaguchi’s stepmother, the rule followed them everywhere. Impatience rattled them until Akiteru got home. Although Yamaguchi loved them, to Kei, outside endeavors were merely a way to make time crawl by faster. The fire ant incident ensured this. This was especially true on days when the listings book read fun things like _Insect Wars, Shark Beach Revisited,_ or _How It’s Made: Silly Putty._ Times after school were sweet and warm, then.

And then there was the medieval special.

“Jousting!” Akiteru called, and threw the broom like a spear into Kei’s bedroom window.

Kei put his hands on his hips and regarded the resulting crack. On his bed, Yamaguchi started to cry. The broom clattered to the floor, but not before it swiped the lamp from Kei’s bedside table. Although it didn’t break, the harp was irreparably bent. The lampshade hung weirdly to the left and wobbled every time the door was shut because Akiteru broke its spine. Kei eyed the crack in the glass a bit more before he turned to his brother, pushing his glasses haughtily up his nose.

“That’s not even _how_ you joust, Nii-chan.”

Akiteru blinked at him. Kei blinked back. It was a stalemate.

Kei handed Yamaguchi a tissue from the box on the floor that the lamp took with it.

He gave up trying to have the window fixed when his parents ignored his second request. He figured if a murderer broke into his room and gouged him, that’d teach them. They would definitely learn their lesson if that happened. Then they’d have to live with the guilt of it, all because they couldn’t be bothered to replace two lousy panes of glass which, as Kei learned later, is not overly difficult because both his parents had broken their fair share of windows through his teenage years and they seemed to all be repaired within the week. They were shiny and brand new, like nothing ever happened. Kei was not surprised to hear the thunk of sorry birds against the translucent glass. His window would never be that new.

But then Kei just didn’t care. Other than the veins and the look of disarray it presented, the crack made no difference. It was merely a slight deviation from the enclosed coordination of his bedroom. He still catches Yamaguchi looking at it warily sometimes like it might become its own entity and attack. Then he looks to Kei like he expects him to leap in front of him and take the bullet, right in the nick of time. Akiteru laughs at it when he visits.

But other than those things, the crack made no difference.

________________  


  
“Fifteen.”

“Nope.”

“Um, twenty-seven.”

“Nope.”

“You have to say higher or lower.”

“Fine.”

“Seventy?” Yamaguchi guesses.

“Lower,” answers Kei.

“Sixty?”

“Higher.”

“If it’s sixty-nine, I’m gonna kick you.”

Kei’s laugh stirs the air. Dust particles dance in the sunbeam that cuts through the room.

“It’s not,” he assures.

“Okay. Sixty-five.”

“Higher.”

“Sixty-eight?”

“Higher.”

“Tsukki.”

Kei snickers. “It was. It was sixty-nine.”

The bed shifts beneath them when Yamaguchi lifts himself onto his elbows. Kei refuses his parental stare. He turns his head, cheek pressed to the covers to stare at the zigzag design on Yamaguchi’s socks. His legs cross at the ankle next to Kei’s head. Kei’s glasses shift to the side. He eyes a long shirt sleeve that drapes over the edge of the bed like it wants to crawl up.

“Jesus Christ,” moans Yamaguchi. “You are a child.”

Yamaguchi's words come out curved like the playful bend of pages in an open book.

“Hey. Show me some respect—I am your elder.”

“I can’t wait until next month so you can’t make that joke anymore.”

He drops back on the bed. He throws his arm to the side so it rests across Kei’s ankles but then quickly moves it like Kei will disagree. Yamaguchi heaves a weighted sigh. There’s pitter-patter outside the bedroom door; his siblings run rampant down the hall.

“I can’t turn eighteen,” he whines. “How do you handle it?”

Kei blinks at the ceiling.

“The same way I handle anything,” he replies, and that way is by simply not handling it at all.

“With aplomb?” teases Yamaguchi.

Suddenly, Kei wants to smash the statued version of himself Yamaguchi clings to, or what’s left of it—everything from its head to its kneecaps crumbled in the last two years but still Yamaguchi holds on, arms locked around obelisk ankles even as the real, flesh and blood Kei drags him away. Or maybe Yamaguchi obliterated his illusions years back and Kei didn’t even notice.

What else had he failed to notice?

“Okay,” says Yamaguchi. “My turn.”

“Is it eighteen?” Kei wonders.

Again, Yamaguchi leans up on his elbows. “How did you know that?”

“I can hear you thinking about it.”

He hums lowly, pensively and Kei coughs around the brick in his chest because he remembers when Yamaguchi turned eleven, short and nervous with a single front tooth because his sister knocked out the other with a lucky swing from a plastic baseball bat. Of all days, this happened on Yamaguchi’s actual birthday. And at his party, nonetheless.

Yamaguchi’s birthdays pass like parades. They are colorful and alive and heaving with grand, proud lungfuls, and they linger to where pieces of paper confetti are found stomped into the carpet of the living room weeks after the fact. This is so for his brothers and sisters, too. The unanimity of the celebration takes away the significance, or so thinks Yamaguchi. Courteously, Kei disagrees. But he gets it.

Kei’s own birthdays pass quietly, softly without upheaval. His birthday weeks back involved nothing more than Yamaguchi, an embarrassing purple cupcake and an impersonal yet generous cash fund from his parents. It lies in a box on his desk until he thinks of one plausible thing on which to spend it. Maybe he’ll save it for something he can do once he can drive.

“I can hear you thinking, now,” Yamaguchi says, words warped through a yawn. “What about?”

“A road trip.”

“You mean it?” he asks, sitting up fully. Kei shrugs but the mattress under him doesn’t really allow for it, so it’s more of stiff raising of his shoulders. Yamaguchi stares at him. “Would be helpful to know how to drive first.”

“Yeah,” breathes Kei, “I was thinking that.”

He’s instantly drowsy with Yamaguchi grinning down at him like that. Kei wants nothing more than to turn onto his side and take a nap, but in the center of Yamaguchi’s bed so its owner would have to accommodate himself around him or maybe move to the desk chair across the room. 

“A road trip with Tsukki,” mutters Yamaguchi, in a way that the dreamy riff of a harp resounds immediately afterward and Yamaguchi is transported into some kind of impeccably ideal, flash-forward fantasy with a rosy pink hue and blurred, drunk edges.

Kei stays quiet. He lets Yamaguchi think about that. Kei doubts he even wants to go on a road trip in the first place; the prospect of driving more than fifteen kilometers fresh off his license constructs a wall of paranoia inside him that he’s unwilling to scale. But the thought is nice. The thought of being away is nice. It’s comfortable, like a goose-feather pillow beneath his head after years of sleeping on granite.

He doesn’t ask but wonders what it is Yamaguchi comes up with and if it’s anything like what it will actually be—or _would_ be—if Kei was in the business of actually fucking doing things instead of just thinking them or talking about doing them. He sets the white ball on the tee and then meanders back to the cart.

There’s something always in Yamaguchi’s eyes that says: _Take the fucking swing._


	2. handle with care

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanna make something good  
> i wanna make something better  
> something that cannot leave the ground  
> unless we lift it up together.
> 
> \- note to self / modern baseball

Kageyama slips the straw from its wrapper and balls the thin plastic in his fist.

“You and Yamaguchi are going to the same college, right?”

His voice travels to Kei lightly, breezily like he asks about the weather. He jams the red straw into his paper cup and drops the crinkled wrapper between his feet. Kei watches it gradually unfurl, plastic glittering in the sunlight. He drags his nails over the cement of Kageyama’s porch.

Watching him, Kageyama says, “That’s not a file.”

“Shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“You first,” Kei retorts. “Are you and Hinata?”

His empty cup topples in the cool breeze. Kei rights it.

“Are me and Hinata what?” Kageyama asks.

“Are you going to the same college? Are you going at all?”

Top-heavy, his head falls to the side. “I don’t know if either of us’ll go.”

Kei can’t count the number of times on one hand Yamaguchi has asked him about the future; about locations and studies and universities and jobs so concretely that Kei feels stuck each and every time, helplessly lodged between adolescence and adulthood while Yamaguchi struggles with a crowbar, trying to pry him out.

So Kei pockets Kageyama’s indecision. It makes him think he can conquer his own.

Another breeze takes the straw wrapper but neither of them moves to retrieve it. They only watch as it blows further and further from them until it leaps from the porch entirely, twinkling in the trimmed grass of Kageyama’s front lawn. 

________________

   
“Goddamnit. Stop putting my meals on the floor.”

“If you made your own food,” says Kei, “she wouldn’t have the opportunity to put them on the floor.”

His father’s response is patient.

“Kei, you don’t make your own food.”

Kei likes the sizzles and clangs of kitchens. He likes the technique and measurements.

“If I had to, I would.”

His mother touches his wrist. “You don’t have to.”

Kei decides then and there that maybe he will, if only to defy her. He moves so her hand falls off his wrist. Her french-tipped nails clack on the glossy tabletop. His father drags his chair back and the hair on Kei’s arms stands up; the sharp screech screams through the kitchen. The racket clambers up the walls, stripping paint as it goes.

The room is still warm from the stovetop. Kei watches the bowl of hot food in the center of the table, equidistant from the three of them though kilometers away. Steam floats from it in a slant like smog from a smokestack.

“You don’t have to pull it back that far,” growls his mother. “That sound is dreadful.”

“I don’t _have_ to pull it back at all. Because my food is on the goddamn floor.”

She flies from her chair and it tips back in her haste, clattering on hard marble.

“Because you’re a goddamn _dog!”_

Kei’s able to secure half of a sweet potato on his plate before his father sends the enormous, steaming bowl crashing to the floor. Noodles slosh over the cracked porcelain rim. Brown broth swirls over the pristine tile. Kei holds his plate still in his hands. The pathetic chunk of potato stares up at him and he slips from his chair, exhausted at his very core.

“You all come from me, so you should eat like dogs on the floor, too!” bellows his father.

His mother presses a fist to her chest. “ _I_ didn’t come from you. Are you drunk?”

Kei leaves them in the kitchen, two tigers in a steadfast cage.

His parents were not always the way they are. Their odd sort of tolerable loathing for one another stacked up brick by critical brick until one summer it exploded like an atom bomb, shards of their emerging dysfunction piercing the drywall, cutting the drapes in two and sawing through the flatscreen television.  Kei prefers this to their passive aggressiveness. That was just painful.

If not for Yamaguchi to vent to, he would surely detonate.

Not like Kei _does_ vent to Yamaguchi, except when things inflate and inflate until they pulse against Kei’s seams, threatening to rip through. But at least he retains the option. Yamaguchi is a fantastic listener. This is contrary to Kei who has an urge to internally complete the tail end of any spoken sentence with his own words during even momentary lulls. Do his parents do the same?

The single latch that remains fastened between them is their routine. Kei would like to say it’s their children—him and his brother. But it’s their routine, their rut that keeps them locked in the life they’ve created together, the sides of which are festooned with claw marks. They could unfasten the latch. It could be easy.  But instead they beat it with the bluntest objects they can find—the Buddha bust in the foyer, the river rock paperweight on the office desk, the cast iron frying pan Akiteru bought them with his first paycheck—and hope it cracks and clatters to the floor with echoed finality. They could breathe easy, then.

But until then they hold their breath, eyes bulging, veins popping and red as fire in the face. 

________________

  
A hankering for something sweet pulls Kei from his room well after midnight.

He considered keeping sweets in his desk until his brother told him it would frenzy the contents of his ant farm and he’d wake up to a black, twitching swarm infesting his desk drawers. Kei was twelve. He threw out his ant farm the very next day. The nature channel’s _Insect Wars_ was less fun after that.

Yamaguchi’s own affinity for kept creatures came in the form of sea monkeys. Since none of his siblings ever ruined it for him, he kept them until he was fourteen. And because they don’t last more than a few months, the restocking was constant. Yamaguchi was devastated each time.

Kei halts in the threshold to the kitchen at an unpleasant _kssh-kssh-kssh-_ ing.

On his knees, his father scrubs the kitchen floor in full business attire. Steel wool glints between his fingers. Kei waits without a word until he’s noticed.

“Don’t you have work tomorrow?” he wonders.

His father nudges his tie further over his shoulder to keep it out of his way.

“Yes,” he replies levelly. “Don’t you have school?”

“Yes.”

He nods and returns to his task, fervently as if to make up for the mere seconds lost on Kei. Kei watches the dizzy spin of his hand as he scrubs. The _kssh-kssh-kssh-_ ing climbs right inside him and disrupts his insides, scrambling his thoughts in the moment. On the far side of the counter, the sink drips.

“Is it okay to walk on?”

“If you must,” instructs his father, “stick to the tiles that line the counter.”

No suitable route leads to the pantry so Kei sidles his way to the fridge. He grabs a box of leftover noodles and decides he’d rather eat them cold than hang around the kitchen for even the two minutes it would take to microwave them, hovering over whatever caffeinated entity has possessed his father. He pads back to his bedroom on socked feet.

The white glow of his phone breaks through the dark. He leaves the chilled box of food on the desk.

“What?” he mumbles.

“Were you asleep?”

“No.”

“Oh. I was.”

“Sounds like it.”

Yamaguchi’s voice plods over phone lines. “So everything’s okay?”

Kei takes a minute to assess himself and notes the following: a throbbing in his forehead, a hungry twist in his stomach, an ache in his thumb acquired at volleyball practice, a general sense of unease and the lingering uproar in his ears of steel wool on marble.

“It’s fine,” he decides.

Yamaguchi breathes a soft, happy sound and Kei's penultimate affliction evaporates.

“Well,” he murmurs, “I just had this feeling, like—I don’t know, but—I just wanted to make sure.”

Kei plucks a feather that sticks through his comforter. “Of what?”

“That everything was okay,” Yamaguchi tells him.

“What wouldn’t be okay?”

“I don’t know. Any number of things, Tsukki. The world is nuts.”

Kei moves into the center of his bed and settles in.

“ _You_ are nuts. Don’t blame this on the world.”

“Maybe I just missed you. Maybe I just missed Tsukki.”

“You saw me this afternoon.”

“Yeah,” Yamaguchi sighs. “It happens to me sometimes.”

Kei eyes the takeout box on his desk. There’s a shuffle on Yamaguchi’s end like he rests his phone between his pillow and his cheek.

“How are you holding your phone?”

Yamaguchi yawns. “Huh?”

“Right now. How are you holding your phone?”

“I’m not,” he replies. “It’s on my pillow. I’m just laying my head on it.”

Kei grins. He knew it.

________________

  
Yamaguchi pours out bags of assorted candies beside the register then sorts them into piles and if he uses any sort of system, Kei can’t decipher it. He slides them into place one by one with his index finger. Kei stares at the top of his head as he looks down.

“You need a haircut,” he says.

Yamaguchi looks up. “Do I?”

The way his hair frames his face is nice—the most fitting it’s looked in years.

“No. I take it back.”

Yamaguchi rolls a caramel sphere into the pile nearest Kei and asks, “You wanna cut it for me, Tsukki?”

Yamaguchi’s stepmother cuts his hair. She cuts all her children's hair because it’s cheap and she’s good at it. She’s even cut Kei’s hair a couple times when his parents refused, telling him it was too short already. They didn't notice the change either way. It was a loop in the system made feasible by the fact that his parents possess no observational skills in regards to things or people that are not the flaws of one another or the status of the kitchen floor. Kei’s unsure if it has allowed him to grow unhindered and free or lacking and unornamented, like a wisteria vine without a cage up which to climb and keep safe and strong.

“You do not want me to cut it.”

“I don’t?”

“No. You just want me to play with it.”

“Ah,” Yamaguchi drawls, guilty. “Yeah.”

“Then no.”

He pushes a banana-flavored candy across the counter. Kei pushes another of the same by its side and Yamaguchi nods, pleased. The soft slap of cardboard on tile resounds from where Shimada flattens boxes by the shop’s back door.

Kei moves out of the way to let a customer check out. He listens to Yamaguchi’s voice change as he talks her through her purchase—his usual smooth, chirpy cadence gains bumps and hedges and Kei surfs atop the waves. Yamaguchi’s eyes flick over the woman’s shoulder to glance at him like Kei does something spectacular instead of just stands there, quiet and unimposing.

The shop’s bell chimes when she leaves. It’s the loudest sound in the shop all evening.

“Isao gave me great idea for my birthday,” Yamaguchi says, voice ironing out again.

“Did he?”

“You’re gonna hate this.”

“Can’t wait.”

He splays his hands on the counter. “A _costume party_.”

“I’m busy that day,” says Kei.

“I can’t believe I haven’t thought of it before!” Yamaguchi raves. “I mean, it’s only a couple weeks after Halloween. You know? Besides, it’ll be fun for my brothers and sisters. Tsuru and I’s birthday parties are basically for them at this point, anyway. Hana and Dad said so.”

Since Yamaguchi was born after midnight, his twin sister’s birthday occurs the day prior to his. To avoid the dreaded shared party, their parents shove her parties to the subsequent weekend _._ Kei has not been invited since he was twelve.

“No they didn’t.”

“Okay, so they didn’t. But I just know.”

“You’re excited about this,” Kei voices, staring blankly at him. “Don’t act like you’re not.”

“Oh, I am. I totally am, Tsukki.”

Kei nods. Yamaguchi grins brightly and Kei attempts to evaluate the wattage of it before his stare falls to the counter and slides between the colorful clusters of candy, his ears picking up the hum of overhead fluorescents. Yamaguchi continues to dutifully sort the sweets into their piles. There’s a streak of red just below where the strap of his apron hangs around his neck. He needs to stop putting things in the apron’s pockets that weigh it down. The fabric rubs over the spot when Yamaguchi turns to the shelves and absently, Kei wonders if it stings.

“Tsukki, start thinking about your costume.”

“I have a feeling you’ve already thought about it for me.”

“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t,” Yamaguchi singsongs.

“You have. Tell me.”

“Alright, alright. So I found these at a local rental place.”

He fishes his phone from his apron pocket and pulls up a web page. Proudly, he hands it over.

“Oh my god,” Kei mutters.

“Hinata and Kageyama will do a pair thing,” Yamaguchi reports, “so I thought we could, too.”

Kei stares at him. “Why?”

Yamaguchi watches the candy intently like it might come to life and try to escape, rolling off the counter and making a mad dash toward Shimada Mart’s front door. He shifts his weight from foot to foot like at any moment he may have to sprint and block the exits.

“I don’t know,” he claims. “Because it’d be fun. Why does anyone do anything?”

“Yamaguchi, I’m not being your Zelda. I don’t have the grace.”

Yamaguchi blinks at him. “Tsukki, you have _all_ the grace.”

“I really—”

“Maybe that’s why I lack even a drop of grace, okay,” he hypothesizes, fingers tapping thoughtfully against his chin, “because over the years you’ve absorbed all mine by proximity and kept it for yourself like some sort of… _grace amoeba_. Or vampire. Your call. But I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.”

Kei heaves a sigh. Yamaguchi perks up; he knows he’s won.

“I’m not wearing the wig. Or the dress.”

“Aw,” he whines.

“But if you find me the gloves,” Kei offers, “I will wear those.”

“ _Yes!”_

In the far corner, Shimada squashes another box. The back door unlatches and a metal sound squeaks through the shop.

“What time is it?” Kei asks.

Yamaguchi pokes his phone to life again, his grin residual.

“I get off in ten minutes,” he replies.

“I’m hungry.”

“Hinata is at Sakanoshita if you wanna meet him.”

He drops his phone back into his pocket and stares expectantly up at him, chin lifted ever so slightly because Kei is still that much taller than him. Kei shrugs; a non-answer. Yamaguchi shrugs back. He places a jawbreaker in the pile furthest from him, next to a pack of licorice straws and some soda candies.

________________

  
Kei ignores Kageyama’s _what are you getting for Yamaguchi’s birthday_ text because he’s undecided, and it isn’t until the following week that he finds something cool and relevant that merits Yamaguchi’s possession.

He finds it in a gaming store that’s lodged incongruously between two boutiques as if it was wedged there one unfortunate day and welded to the concrete, forbidden to relocate someplace suitable and beneficial. Kei stares at the bald patch on the back of the sole employee’s head as he lowers the gift from the shelf behind the counter and tells Kei to be careful because it’s fragile; it’s handmade of clay. Like the sunlit ocean, its deep blue glaze shines under the shop lights. He’s curious if his mother could make something like it. 

He sets it on the kitchen counter when he gets home so he remembers to ask.

Kei sits on his bed and guesses where Yamaguchi will let the gift reside in his room. He imagines he’ll want to set it on his nightstand but Yamaguchi is too clumsy for that, Kei will tell him, and suggest he move it elsewhere—a spot that his swatting hands don’t frequent. Yamaguchi might set it on his desk atop the shelf, but on the opposite side as the framed photograph of his mother as not to pull attention from her. Maybe he’ll put it on the table adjacent his bed that holds a small television—the kind with the blocky, protruding back because the Yamaguchi household willfully remains on the very fringe of the twentieth century.

He sees Yamaguchi taking it up and holding it sometimes, its solid weight shared over cupped hands. He hears him telling his younger siblings _no_ , _you can’t hold it_ because _it’s_ _fragile, Tsukki said so_ and they’d muss up its sheen with their fingerprints anyway. Kei figures he can’t fade from Yamaguchi, then, if there’s something at his desk or by his television or on his nightstand that reflects all the light and wonder that Kei lacks, artifactual and deep, deep blue.

It’s an ocarina. It goes perfectly with Yamaguchi’s costume.

________________

  
The warm orange of late afternoon spills across the sky when Kei awakens from an impromptu nap. He sees the color through the crack in the glass and through his blinds, tilted open. He goes to the balcony doors and stares through them, ogling the autumn color because he’s tired and he’s sentimental when he’s tired, all heavy eyelids and heavier limbs. He turns the cool, golden knob. He stands on the biting wood of the balcony until his bare feet can’t handle any more. 

Kei hovers lazily around his room, pulling at the sticker on his arm and wincing when it yanks the hair beneath it. Hinata presented Yamaguchi with a plethora of sticker sheets in the school hallway: smiley faces, stars, balloons, animals, different animals and more of the same. Their adhesive quality must be legitimate if the glitter tiger managed to stay plastered to Kei’s forearm through his nap. He feels bad once he peels it off so he blinks and returns it to the same spot. 

The softness of sleep wears gradually from him and calamity surfaces. He hears it first. He slips on socks and gets to the mouth of the hallway after a sharp crash resounds over his parents’ nonsensical shouts. The living room is cool—his father’s turned down the heater again.

“What fucking letter?” he howls.

“This fucking letter,” his mother shrieks back, waving folded papers.

“What in the hell is that?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know. Don’t treat me like I’m _stupid_.”

Kei leans against the doorway. His father unhooks his cufflinks, dropping them onto the kitchen counter. They clink on the granite.

“I didn’t say a goddamn word about that, and I don’t know what that is.”

His mother stiffens, flames licking her pupils. “It’s probably some sort of code she uses.”

“It’s probably some sort of _spam,_ ” argues his father. “Look, now—you’ve tarnished the wood.”

Kei leans off the doorframe. His eyes snap from one smattering of jagged pieces shrouded in clay dust to the next. Rubble spans across the cherry wood of the living room floor—jagged, dusty shards of deep, deep blue. His heart beats in his fingertips.

“Hey,” he utters. “I got that for someone.”

His voice is underwhelming. His parents' steamroll his in an instant.

“Just admit it to me, just admit it—”

“You’re hallucinating,” his father booms, “and you need to take a goddamn nap, that’s what you need to do.”

“ _Hey,_ ” Kei says again.

“You’d love if I were completely blind to it all, wouldn’t you?”

“That wasn’t yours to break,” he goes on. “It wasn’t even mine to break.”

“Yes _—_ then you wouldn’t scream your fucking head off about _nothing_.”

The papers make a weird, wobbly sound when his mother waves them through the air.

“ _Nothing?_ You’re out of your mind, I mean it. Go to hell.”

Kei leaves before his father can say _too late_ and stares at the digital clock on his bedside table until all four numbers stick to his eyelids when he blinks. He digs the sleep from his eyes, pulls on a jacket and checks that his costume is in his pocket. There isn’t time for anything else.

He goes to Yamaguchi’s empty-handed.


	3. cream-colored disc

“Who are you supposed to be, _Tsookie?”_

None of his siblings pronounce it quite the way Yamaguchi does. It amuses Kei to no end.

“You can’t guess?” he asks.

“Oh! I know, I know. You’re Sailor Moon!”

Kei huffs, pulling his hand deeper into the white, imitation-silk glove. A plastic arrow with a rubber tip zings between them from a toy Kei supposes is for Yamaguchi’s costume, but somehow found its way into the hands of his little sister. The arrow thunks into the wall by the front door and clatters to the floor.

“Close enough,” says Kei. “Where’s your big brother?”

Isao blinks up at him. “The birthday brother?”

“The birthday brother, yes. Where is he?”

“In his room, _Tsookie_.”

“Thanks. Now go protect the citizens of Gotham.”

In his bedroom, Yamaguchi stands in front of his mirror with his hands on his hips. He sports full green gear. With this, he will expose to the entire party his lifelong, undeniable, and fictional crush. He can’t fool Kei. Yamaguchi turns when Kei taps his fingers on the doorframe.

“I’m blond. I should have been Link.”

Yamaguchi blushes pink. He situates the brown leather belt on his hips.

“Zelda’s blonde too, Tsukki,” he insists. “How do I look?”

“Fine.”

Yamaguchi shrugs and turns back to the mirror.

“I’m not like you, Tsukki. I don’t get better looking with every breath, okay?”

“Oh my god, shut up.”

Yamaguchi’s mouth falls open like a trap door when Kei crosses his arms over his chest.

“The _gloves_ —you’re wearing the gloves!”

Kei crosses his arms tighter. “I told you I would.”

Yamaguchi pokes at the loose fabric over Kei’s skinny wrists and grins, subsided flush returning full force, vengeful and red this time. Outside the door, someone skitters down the hallway. Yamaguchi’s green, down-pointed hat lies funny on his head in a way that makes his bangs shoot out from his forehead. When Kei tells him, Yamaguchi rights them with his fingers.

“You look heroic,” he tells him.

“Thanks. I’d look even more heroic if I could find my bow.”

“Fumika has it.”

Yamaguchi snickers. “Tattletale.”

“Just trying to help the local hero.”

“Right.”

“The hero is destined to appear. And he alone must face the person who began the Great—”

“Do you see my gloves?”

“On your desk chair.”

Yamaguchi holds his hat as he leans over to pick them up. He pulls them on, big and bulky where Kei’s own are delicate. The leather groans when Yamaguchi curls his fingers into his palm. He grins down at his hands.

“Alright, let’s go. Misashi keeps trying to _magick_ the cat. He’s driving my stepmom up the wall.”

Kei trails Yamaguchi from his room, closing the door behind him.

“You speak of magic?” he recites. “Still your tongue for a moment, and I will tell you of both magic and the oppression of ages—”

“Tsukki, oh my god.”

“What?” he deadpans. “I’m getting into character.”

“You’re quoting the _bad guys_.”

Kei pulls his gloves further up his arms. They keep slipping down. He notes their identical color to Yamaguchi’s tights, stark white against the true green of his felt tunic. He trudges proudly down the hallway in front of Kei, boots slapping the floor. Yamaguchi hadn’t noticed Kei’s lack of a present and, seeing him, Kei forgot too. He’ll leave it for later. Yamaguchi looks so happy now.

________________  
  


Hinata and Kageyama arrive as Mario and Luigi. Yamaguchi comes apart when he sees them.

Some of the first and second years on the volleyball team hover around Kei for a while and then gradually depart from him as the night shuffles along, drawn away by chaos and colors. The kids are high on sugar. Yamaguchi’s siblings and their friends dart around the living room like minnows.

Yamaguchi sits on the floor and ties Fumika’s hair up into a braided bun with Hinata looking on in awe; he wants to learn how to do the same for his own sister. Fumika’s friends sit on the sofa at Yamaguchi’s back. They chirp and giggle, tugging at his tunic. The one on the arm of the couch has chocolate icing smeared on her forehead but none of the others say a word. Kei plucks candy after candy from the bowl on the kitchen table, welcoming cavities.

“It’s hot in here with all these people,” Kageyama says, pressing Yamaguchi’s hat to his chest because they swapped midway through the evening.

“Yeah. What’s that?”

“Oh. Yamaguchi’s gift.”

Kei stares at the trio of cake boxes in his hand, tied together with a pathetic blue ribbon.

“Are you fucking serious?” he asks.

Kageyama recoils. “What?”

“You’ve known the guy for three years.”

He examines the glossy boxes like he sees them for the first time after they’ve been suddenly thrust into his possession. Kei leers at the photoshopped pictures of glamorous cakes and muffins that adorn the packaging, topped with bright frosting and fruit slices.

“Yeah,” replies Kageyama. “And?”

“And you get him _cake mix_ for his birthday?”

“Hinata said chocolate is his favorite flavor.”

Yamaguchi’s favorite flavor is hazelnut.

“Besides,” Kageyama continues hotly, “he _liked_ them. He said we could bake them together.”

Kei blinks. “I would pay to see that.”

“Too bad. You aren’t invited.”

“Sure. Okay.”

“I don’t see _your_ gift,” notes Kageyama.

“It broke.”

“Right,” he sneers.

“Shut the fuck up.”

Kageyama smirks, sharklike. The minnow kids even veer around him in pursuit of one another. Across the room, Hinata lifts Kageyama’s hat from Yamaguchi’s head and plops it atop his own. He gives Yamaguchi his red one in return.

Idly, Kei scans the kitchen counter. The paper towel holder is void of even a bare cardboard roll. Yamaguchi’s stepmother has probably grabbed it to sop up a spill or at least to keep it by her side wherever she is with the wise thought that there will inevitably be one in the near future. The sad but delicious remains of Yamaguchi’s cake sit alone by the sink next to a stack of frosting-smeared plates. Kei will stay after everyone has left and help make order of things. He’ll do this because he’s done it since he was thirteen.

A lightweight, Yamaguchi will be asleep on the couch by ten.

“Why are you just…carrying them around?” Kei asks.

“I didn’t know where to put them.”

“This new place called the pantry.”

Kageyama looks around. “Where’s that?”

He hands over the boxes when Kei reaches for them. He’s grateful for the menial task.

“Who are you supposed to be? Sailor Moon?” Kageyama wonders, eyeing his gloves.

“Shut the fuck up. Twice.”

There’s an odd, enchanting and sleepy feeling that comes with slipping away from crowds and parties. The hollers fall to hums and Kei is one person, alone, detached from the others keeping so close and connected. He could stay in the short hallway past the kitchen. He could sit with his back to the wall and pull his legs to his chest and nap with his chin on his knees. Yamaguchi’s stepmother would find him there when she needed another paper towel roll from the pantry.

The pantry holds not only bread loaves and enormous, bulk packs of beef-flavored ramen, but also Yamaguchi’s sister. Her boyfriend stands short and stumpy at her side. Inky wine trembles at the bottom of the bottle she grips around its neck. Kei stares between them for a moment.

“This is a children’s birthday party,” he mentions.

She smacks her hand on her hip, wedged between cornstarch flour and boxes of noodles.

“My brother is _eighteen_ ,” she growls through gritted teeth. She shoves the wine bottle next to the noodles and pushes past him, companion in tow. It’s jarring to have someone who looks exactly like Yamaguchi loathe him so much. Kei leers at the curls in her hair, blinking when she turns over her shoulder and adds, “Not like you treat him any different from a kid.”

They vanish down the hall. Kei looms in the doorway of the tiny pantry and stares at the bunch of ripe bananas on the shelf. The bananas stare back. The floor creaks under him and Kei imagines himself puncturing the wood and crashing down into the storage area below the house. He sees spiders skitter under dusty, unwanted furniture at the commotion. Blindly, he pushes the cake boxes onto the shelf at his side.

He tells the bananas, “That isn’t true.”

“What’s not true, _Tsookie_?”

Kei turns around and stares down at Yamaguchi’s middle brother, his great grey beard hiding half his face.

“Someone said you weren’t the best wizard in Japan,” he answers.

“Oh. Yes,” Misashi chirps, pleased. “Issi shot an arrow on top of the fridge. Can you help me get it?” He twirls his tiny thumbs around one another. “Um, I would get it with my magic, you know, but I’m not supposed to use it outside school. Tadashi said so.”

“Tadashi is right,” Kei tells him. “Come on.”

________________  
  


Kei dries dishes and wipes countertops and sends people on their way, all while dutifully donning his gloves. The local hero sleeps through his stepmother’s vacuuming. He curls up on the couch in a loose green ball. Yamaguchi is impossibly soft when he sleeps, like a stuffed animal packed with too much fluff. 

Yamaguchi’s father takes him to his bed and Kei wants to laugh—eighteen years old and being carried around like a rag doll—but instead just trails behind them and sits on the corner of Yamaguchi’s bed once his father has gone. Kei peels off his gloves. He curls his fingers into his palms a few times, getting used to the texture of his own skin. He drapes the gloves over the desk chair but they look creepy like that, just dangling, so Kei folds them in half and sets them on Yamaguchi’s nightstand instead.

The hero stirs.

“Hey,” he mumbles, “you carried me here?”

Kei turns and nods.

“With my Hylian strength,” he says.

Yamaguchi grins against his pillow. “Liar.”

“It was your dad.”

“Makes more sense.”

Hubbub comes through the wall: Yamaguchi’s brothers in the next room, wired from sweets and camaraderie. Unwilling to focus, Kei’s eyes move over the wrinkles in Yamaguchi’s blanket. Yamaguchi shimmies backward on his bed until he finds the wall.

“Don’t bother with the futon,” he murmurs with eyes closed.

The ceiling fan whirs. In the very center shines a bright globe light bulb. The shape of it stays trapped in Kei’s stare when he glances away and stretches over the space Yamaguchi’s made for him, watching the orb the fan blades create, spinning so quickly, a cream-colored disc twitching against the eggshell white ceiling.

“Yamaguchi,” he starts.

Yamaguchi hums.

“I did get you a present.”

Yamaguchi peeks open an eye.

“My parents broke it,” Kei finishes.

He watches the cream-colored disc come closer and closer until he feels it shiver in his throat. But when he blinks, it’s back on the ceiling.

Yamaguchi sticks out his leg so he nudges Kei’s ankle. He still has his boots on. Kei sits up and tugs them off, dropping them to the carpet with muffled thuds. He lies back down and Yamaguchi nudges him again, bootless now, his toes warm on the inch of skin between the leg of Kei’s jeans and his sock. To his admission, it is exactly the amount of response Kei wanted. How does Yamaguchi always know?

The room is still and languid save the frenzied spinning of the fan. Yamaguchi’s flyaways twitch from the draft. Kei wants to pull the covers over himself but they both lie atop them and it isn’t worth the fuss. He ignores the draft and listens to the faint thumps in the next room, soon met with another, steadier voice—Yamaguchi’s stepmother reprimands his brothers. Her lilt floats through the shared wall. 

Kei knows she won’t check Yamaguchi’s room. She gives him and his twin a wider parental birth. Kei suspects it’s because they are the only offspring in her home that aren't hers by blood. She wavers—but does not wilt—in the shadow of Yamaguchi’s late mother. This sole disconnection creates an extra inch between the two of them and her. She adores Yamaguchi. She adores Tsuru. The only reason Kei notices the inch is because he’s studied it for years with both microscopes and binoculars.

When Yamaguchi turns onto his side, Kei does too.

He stares at the protrusion of Yamaguchi’s scapula. Yamaguchi shuffles backward and if he had wings, Kei would have a mouthful of feathers. A soft moan escapes when Yamaguchi yawns. The thought scatters. The fabric of his costume would be scratchy, probably, if Kei rested his chin on the back of Yamaguchi’s shoulder.

They fall asleep with the light on.


	4. saving...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there are certain things you ask of me and there are certain things i lack  
> in the beginning we were winning, now i'm just making up facts.
> 
> \- be nice to me / the front bottoms

“You didn’t.”

“Oh, I _did_ , Tsukki.”

“When? Why wasn’t I consulted?”

“I knew you’d disapprove, so I didn’t tell you.”

Kei expected that. It’s not even the fact that Yamaguchi wears the long kneepads that fucks him up but the fact that he wears them _wrong—_ the stretchy black fabric stops just below the hem of his shorts so a single inch of tawny skin peeks out. Like that, they look like thigh high socks. They should not look like that. They are kneepads, so they should look like kneepads. Yamaguchi turns to face him with his hands on his hips, ever so pleased.

“They won’t help you play better,” says Kei.

“But are you absolutely sure?”

“No.”

“Won’t hurt to try, Tsukki. Besides, they look cool. Kageyama knows.”

“ _Kageyama_ ,” Kei growls.

As if summoned, Kageyama barges into the club room and tells them to hurry the hell up. He and Kei exchange middle fingers. Yamaguchi catches the door as it falls behind him, hand splayed over metal. Kei stares at the spaces between his fingers.

“Ready?” Yamaguchi asks.

“Wait a second.”

He lifts his palm from the door so it shuts. “What is it?”

“You’re wearing them wrong,” Kei tells him.

“What?”

“The kneepads. You have to pull them up.”

Yamaguchi looks himself over. “I do?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Kei sighs, coming to stand behind him. “See, watch.”

He tucks himself into Yamaguchi’s side and patiently, pragmatically slips his thumbs under the material of his kneepads. Yamaguchi sucks in a breath and Kei stops; Yamaguchi’s skin is warm from the compression of the fabric. He hadn’t expected it—the warmth, like the center of a bed slept in just moments ago that still boasts body heat.

“Like this,” he instructs.

The mesh of Yamaguchi’s shorts sweeps his knuckles as he stretches his kneepads to rest properly beneath them. He slips his thumbs out. Yamaguchi puffs another breath. Kei wishes he had something to chew on. He wants something to clack against his teeth and roll over his tongue. The unmet need leaves him twitchy and unsettled, stepping in front of Yamaguchi to assess.

Yamaguchi glows hot and red like his skin might scorch and peel right off his skeleton. Yamaguchi burns hot often. He’s been that way forever. Kei is not in the business of making Yamaguchi flush but if he were, he could purchase a small remote island in Angola. He could paint it gold. He could pay for his parents' divorce and Yamaguchi’s college education and lock the rest in a vault, extracting respectable amounts on a biannual basis.

“Better,” he decides.

“Much better,” Yamaguchi agrees, voice wreathing at the edges the way paper curls over a flame.

________________  


  
Akiteru’s bedroom becomes a guest room two years and four months after he leaves and it breaks Kei so wholly that nothing falls out but fissures split his stone skin, deep and concrete. He still waits for grass to sprout in the cracks and grow outward, a hint of green among the gray.

Now the guest room belongs to whichever of his parents stake their claim on any particular night. His mother or father will stomp down the hall and swing the door shut obnoxiously, sometimes waking Kei in his room across the hall but mostly just prompting him to take off his headphones and stare at the lock on his bedroom door. The lamplight glints unspectacularly from its false gold.

An antique coat rack of his mother’s is erected in the far corner of the ex-bedroom. An old robe of his father’s hangs from it, limp and weathered. Mismatched paintings are slung on the walls. Kei’s father’s old wooden clock rests on his mother’s crisp white doily, tick-tocking away the time even when the only ones to listen are people sealed in photographs atop the dresser. His mother’s velvet armchair glares at the wicker rug in front of the closet door, courtesy of his father. Even their possessions clash. The dueling decor makes the room look like it was hurled through time and space and crash-landed in the front yard, deftly welding itself to the side of the house until accepted as part of its original structure.

It is not the room Kei grew up with, with its enormous fish tank and colorful posters and all its shelves. It’s like Akiteru never set foot in it. He sleeps on the living room couch when he visits with the excuse of a draft but Kei knows he finds the parasitic room peculiar too, with all its fragments and relics and threads of lost time, too thin to ever grab hold of but clinging like spider webs to whoever wades through.

Will the same happen to Kei’s room when he leaves? How long before it follows suit? Maybe his mother and father will abandon their own bedroom completely and reside respectively in Kei’s and Akiteru’s, and theirs will grow webs of its own and obtain obscure, leftover possessions like coat racks and old clocks and crisp doilies. Kei will sleep on the couch when he visits, just like his brother. He’ll sleep on the couch until that crumbles too and they’re left with only each other and the webs, slight and sticky on their skin.

________________

  
“And where are your notes on genetically modified foods?”

“In the very back, Tsukki.”

Kei leafs through a sea of blank pages to find them, chewing idly at the end of his pen.

After years of instilling his study habits in Yamaguchi, he’s come to make better use of them than Kei ever has. Yamaguchi’s grades skyrocket while Kei’s hang precariously from the clifftop. Yamaguchi fastens a net beneath them in preparation for their possible but unlikely plummet before graduation in the spring. Kei’s appreciative. Supplemented by Yachi’s color assists, Yamaguchi’s notebook is the most efficient study guide.

“Why are they shoved all the way to the back of your notebook?” he wonders.

“‘Cause it makes me kind of sad.”

Kei flips the page. He eyes the single deviance from the straight, clean lines: his own handwriting, slanted from how he leaned across the aisle to scribble it on Yamaguchi’s notebook because he didn't want to raise his hand and ask. _Glyphosate or triclopyr_ , it reads, and the former is circled with Yamaguchi’s orange highlighter. Kei’s fingertip follows the neon oval like he feels for ridges.

“What does?”

“Genetically modified food,” says Yamaguchi.

Kei sets his pen down and stares. “ _Why_?”

Yamaguchi tucks his own pen behind his ear and answers, “Food is good enough _before_ they enhance it, you know?”

“Yamaguchi, you would eat a rock if I rolled it in sugar.”

“Like that guy from _The NeverEnding Story?”_

“That was mostly limestone.”

“Besides,” he goes on, “how would you like it, Tsukki, if someone wanted to reach inside you and switch your DNA all around?”

“I’d say go for it.”

Yamaguchi squints and snickers. He shakes his head.

“Not if it turned you into some kind of half-man, half-goblin nightmare, you wouldn’t.”

“Is that what you think GMOs do?”

“I don’t know anymore,” he answers. “It’s all blurry.”

Yamaguchi pushes his hair behind his ear and takes his pen. He clicks it once, twice, then once more so he can underline something and Kei watches the ink glide over the paper, burying crisp whiteness in glossy black pigment. He leafs through Yamaguchi’s notebook some more. The pages ruffle. The sound joins the whispered library symphony: the faint pop-and-click of the caps on Yamaguchi’s highlighters, Kei’s occasional typing, their breathing—the soft, general noises of life that come from two people together in a quiet place.

“Wouldn’t mind being half-goblin,” Kei mumbles.

Yamaguchi doesn’t look at him, just uncaps another highlighter and streaks his paper.

“You could live under that bridge behind the school.”

“You’re thinking of a troll.”

“Oh. Well, in no universe are you a troll, Tsukki. Maybe a mermaid—merman, whatever.”

Kei squints at Yamaguchi’s notes. “Why on earth would I be that?”

“Because they’re beautiful,” Yamaguchi answers. He clicks his pen for emphasis. “Duh.”

Kei takes a second.

“They’re fish,” he says.

“Half-fish,” corrects Yamaguchi.

“Half-beautiful,” Kei counters.

He reaches across the table and scrawls a fish tail emerging from the top corner of Yamaguchi’s paper. Yamaguchi’s pen stills, watching as Kei festoons it with scales and adds a slop of seaweed dangling from the tail fin. With his green highlighter, Yamaguchi fills it in.

________________

  
Kei answers Yamaguchi’s texts while he replays his snaps while he skims his emails, each conversation revolving around something different because Yamaguchi has one hundred thoughts at any given moment and Kei always takes it upon himself to absorb and unravel every single one of them.

He can’t pinpoint when Yamaguchi became impossible to ignore; when his movements shone so bright to draw Kei’s stare or when his words started to shift lyrically in the air between them, dripping slowly like clover honey in his ears. Yamaguchi is sweet to the eyes, the ears, the touch. Every poke leaves Kei’s fingertips flecked with granules of sugar. Maybe Yamaguchi is sweet to taste, too.

His phone buzzes and pings in his hand and Kei doesn’t look up when his father comes into his room. He always knocks with the knuckle of his index finger, softly like Kei’s bedroom door is a bomb threatening to detonate. He clears his throat.

“Hey. You busy?” he rumbles.

Kei lifts his eyes from his phone. “Kind of. Why?”

“I wanted to show you something.”

“Now?”  
  
“You’re not busy,” his father concludes. “I’m looking at you.”

He’s right, of course. Kei looks between his phone and his computer. He sighs, heavier for it.

“Fine. Show me.”

“Alright. Get your shoes.”

His father’s car keys glint in his hand and Kei glances at his computer again because it’s an _out of house_ trip, his least favorite kind. Shadows from the last remaining leaves on the tree outside his window dance across his bedspread. Kei eyes them for a second, unfolding himself. He drops his phone into his pocket. It pings immediately, irritated at being stashed away.

“Get your jacket, too,” his father tells him, “it’s brutal outside.”

The car takes the entire drive to heat up, thin frost sticking smooth and stubborn to the passenger side window. Kei will be grateful for the first snow of the season because it always marks something new in him; something memorable and nostalgic. It simultaneously unlocks and buries his sentiment, the biting cold freezing moments and days in time with no telling of when they’ll melt away to make room for more. Winters feel like checkpoints. A wheel bubbles and spins in the corner of his vision when snow falls: _Saving…_

Instead of warmth, his father’s cologne fills the car. Kei watches him askance as he drives, his meaty fingers tapping the steering wheel despite the absence of music. Men on the radio discuss the stock market like it’s a sports match. Kei pictures them placed around an oval table, mouths pressed too close to their microphones. There’s a nick on his father’s neck—a shaving cut. What would his father do if it suddenly split open? What if it soaked the clean gray of his suit?

“Do you have another set of clothes in this car?”

His father hums. He turns the radio dial between his thumb and forefinger.

“Of course. There’s a set of clothes in the trunk. What do I always say? Always be…” he trails off, prompting.

“Prepared. Always be prepared,” Kei finishes, hurled back to middle school even though his brother heard the phrase more than he did. He drags himself forward into the present day and watches the road ahead curl into a short driveway. The car follows, grit crunching beneath its tires.

“There are jumper cables back there, too. And a weather radio.”

Kei looks over. “Really?”

“Yeah. Just in case.”

He blinks. “Can I see it later?”

His father kills the engine and replies, “Sure. You might have to remind me.”

“Okay.”

He leans forward and looks through the windshield at the house of the driveway they’re parked in. It’s lofted on a small hill, its structure tall and thin like something Godzilla would use as a toothpick. The car doors click and thunk and Kei climbs out after his father. 

“Come on,” he says. “In we go.”

The front door swings open for them. A woman stands tall in the arch, moving swiftly to the side to usher them in. At her presence, his father livens. Kei steps back as they shake hands. She shakes his too, to Kei’s bewilderment, prompting an introduction from his father. The quick, professional action leaves him staggered.

“Your father speaks of you,” she promises.

Kei can’t say the same.

“Oh, uh. Good to meet you,” he says back.

From the inside, the house expands, like the walls were pushed outward the instant they came through the doorway. It’s achingly bare. Kei’s stare slides from one corner of the room to the next, noting where hallways split off.

His father messes with his cufflinks as he and the professional woman talk. He spins one round and round under his fingertip and then switches to spin the other. The Professional’s gem earrings shimmer in the sunlight that glows through the front window. They’re green—Yamaguchi’s favorite color. From where he stands apart from the two of them, Kei can’t identify the exact stone. It could be emerald. Peridot, maybe.

When she steps away, Kei stares hard at his father.

“You want to buy this house, don’t you?”

His father’s gaze breaks from the door behind which The Professional vanished. He stares back at Kei, face bright and open like it isn’t him at all. Like he’s simply placed someone else’s face atop his and it happened to not slide off. He’d been handed a packet of papers when they entered the house and they ruffle against his dress slacks when his arm falls to his side.

“Yeah,” his father answers, “that’s right. I wanted to buy it for us.”

Faintly, softly, something shatters. Kei glances around but all the windows are solid, all the floorboards and light bulbs in tact.

“For who?” he asks.

“Well, for you and I, Kei.”

Kei’s phone pings in his back pocket, a sonic boom through the silence.

“Does Mom know about this?”

His father switches the papers to his opposite hand. “No. I would prefer—”

“If she didn’t, yeah. I get that.”

“Yet,” he adds, a shitty justification.

Kei walks himself through the house when The Professional returns and though it’s empty, it doesn’t _feel_ empty—maybe it’s the invasive sunlight or the warm honey shade of the wood accents or the lack of webs but every bone and muscle of the house looks like it’s already his. He’s possessive of its toothpick-like structure and its too-short driveway.

“To be clear,” he tells his father in the car, “if Mom did exactly this and said not to tell you, I wouldn’t.”

His father meets him with a sturdy, silent moment.

“That’s fair,” he decides.

He eyes the house through the windshield as he backs out onto the road and Kei watches the street for cars in his stead. The Professional waves goodbye from the front porch. Kei should’ve asked which gems she wore but then figures he’ll have another chance, it’s some kind of poking in his gut that tells him so. His father recites the house number when Kei asks.

He plugs it into his phone and it spits out a blue line that zags through unfamiliar then familiar streets, an initial pinpoint crawling across the screen as the car drives. Yamaguchi’s is twenty-three minutes away, walking. Eleven minutes more than it is from his current home. Eleven minutes is approximately three songs if Kei converts it to headphones time, which he mostly does.

“You could still walk to school,” his father mentions. “Is that what you’re thinking?”

Kei swipes his thumb across his phone screen, smearing the fingerprints there. “No.”

His father only hums.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're reading this i love you


	5. rabbit, coconut, kayak, kei

When Yamaguchi laughs, he falls into it, shoulders hunching around his ears and eyes scrunched shut like whatever’s happened is simply too hilarious for all his senses at once. The freckles around his mouth fall into his dimples and only surface again when he calms down. Kei never thought of himself as funny—still doesn’t—but the way Yamaguchi thinks he is makes Kei believe he might be, just a little bit, in a terrible and enigmatic way.

There are aspects of himself Kei only uncovers through Yamaguchi. Sometimes he wishes they’d stay buried instead of scrubbed clean and presented to him on the sterling silver platters that are Yamaguchi’s considerate explanations. Kei was oblivious to his oral fixation until Yamaguchi noticed. Now Yamaguchi goes out of his way to slake it. Employee discount notwithstanding, Shimada can thank him for fifty percent of sunflower seed, hard candy and gum sales in the last two years.

Kei pokes through a packet of sunflower seeds now, searching for one suitable to chew next and ignores the fact that he’ll eat them all eventually. The bed wobbles when Yamaguchi flops onto it. Kei peels half of a shell from his tongue and sets it with the others. Yamaguchi situates himself at his back.

“Wanna play a game?”

“Sounds creepy,” Kei says. “Sounds like you’re going to poison me and tell me the antidote is inside my shinbone.”

Yamaguchi’s shoulders arch with his carbonated laugh.

“I’m going to write something on your back,” he tells him, “and you guess what it is.”

“Do we have to?”

“Yep. Eat your sunflower seeds.”

Yamaguchi drags his finger over his back. Kei traces the dashes and long lines with his eyes on the bedspread in front of him. His shirt shifts and swishes beneath Yamaguchi’s fingertip.

“Horse?” Kei guesses.

“Yep,” chirps Yamaguchi.

“Why were you thinking about a horse?”

“I was thinking about sunflower seeds, then sunflowers, then sunflower fields,” he tells Kei, “and horses walk around in fields. Alright, next one.”

Yamaguchi writes _rabbit, coconut_ , and _kayak_ before he etches one Kei can’t place.

“Again,” Kei directs.

Yamaguchi smoothes his fingertip across Kei’s back, vertical and horizontal and vertical again. He’s gentler now. He’s gentler with this word than he was with _horse_ and certainly _coconut._ Kei even follows along on the bedspread with his own finger but it’s nothing but zigs and zags and Yamaguchi’s patience doesn’t wane, just persists, so tender when Kei asks him to repeat the pattern again.

“Nothing,” Kei decides. “I don’t know.”

“Really?”

He nods.

“It was your name,” Yamaguchi tells him, “it was _Kei_.”

Kei blinks at the pile of chewed sunflower seed shells by his knee. “Oh.” He jostles the packet in his hand and the seeds bumps and shift. Kei plucks one in particular from the rest in the thinning pile and places it on his tongue, telling Yamaguchi, “Okay, last one.”

“Last one?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, okay.”

It’s simple. One swoop, another swoop. Kei squints at his lap. Yamaguchi redraws the easy pattern without prompting and Kei focuses on the shape even though his attention wants to pull to his mouth—he presses the sunflower seed to the roof of it, the hull still unbroken. He rubs his tongue back and forth, tasting salt as Yamaguchi’s finger swoops over his skin. 

“Is it—is it a _heart_?”

Yamaguchi snorts a laugh into his hand.

“You asshole,” Kei accuses, “you said it was a _word_ , my head hurts from trying to work it out.”

Yamaguchi laughs some more and Kei scoots backward on the bed, leaning entirely against him. Yamaguchi folds over and cackles even as Kei pins him with his unbridled weight.

“Ow, Tsukki, I’m bent weird and your shoulder blades are _sharp_ , they’re like _katanas,_ Tsukki,” he warbles through his laughter, “I was flirting and now you’re gonna break my _spine_ , I actually _did_ poison you, okay, but if you kill me, I can’t tell you where the— _ow_ —the antidote is!”

Kei relents. Yamaguchi scrambles to sit beside him, bangs spiked off his forehead.

“Okay,” Kei says. “Tell me where.”

Yamaguchi eyes him seriously. With a slow, grave finger, he points to Kei’s shin. 

He promptly loses it again, flopping backward onto his bed to cackle at the ceiling. He thumps his chest for air. His knee sends seeds scattering across the bedspread like ants on a picnic blanket. Kei watches his spirited eruption, chest tight. His back tingles from being touched so much so softly. He shoves Yamaguchi’s feet out of the way so he can lie back and alleviate it, smothering the warmth before it finds a way through and nestles inside him forever.

________________

  
When he gets home from practice, Kei’s mother is in her studio. The door to the basement is open, the light climbing the stairs to glow demonically onto the clay tile of the foyer. The house is warm. Her kiln must be on. Kei sets his bag at the mouth of the hallway and slinks downstairs, pulled by a string he can't cut.

His mother works at her sculpting table. It’s vaulted, oblong and caked in clay dust, clumps of half-creations scattered unceremoniously over its surface. It would be a nice table if it were cleaned up. Granite-topped and sturdy, it would fit like a charm in the library. But Kei has no actual reference. Since he was small, he’s only seen it like this: chalky and heavy with work while his mother stoops over it, entrenching her perpetually unfortunate posture. The only difference now is that Kei doesn’t have to peek over the edge to see.

He hasn’t been down here for more than a year. He only realizes this because all the tables are rearranged, all the sculptures and shelves, the paint tubes and the pottery wheel. He casts a weary look toward the kiln, always sure he'll open it to his father crammed inside, melted eyeballs stuck to the sides.

Kei’s stare catches on a cube pot on the table by the base of the stairs. The shape is interesting, a dynamic change from the ovals and triangles that dot the room in spades. Why had she decided on a cube? Maybe she’ll put a plant in it and set it in the foyer, right over a floor tile so the squares stay seamless. Kei follows the rim of the pot with his pinky. He recoils swiftly—it _sears_ his skin, the porcelain so intensely hot at first that he mistook it for cold. Kei sucks a breath through gritted teeth. The hiss pulls his mother’s attention over her shoulder, to the hand he presses to his chest. Shame roils in his gut.

“Kei? Did you touch that?”

She leads him to the giant sink and runs cool water over the glaring welt, over where the pot rim burnt a line into the pad of his pinky. Kei glowers at the curve of it, an ugly red defect on his white skin. His mother turns his hand in hers under the faucet.

“Is it better? It’s going to hurt for a while.” The water soothes until the second its chill drains away. Kei moves his finger back under the stream. His mother lets him go and rubs her hands together, flakes of dried clay sprinkling into the sink basin. She asks, “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking objects exceeding one thousand degrees would be by the _kiln_ ,” Kei retorts.

His mother wipes her wet hands on her dusty apron and instantly, they’re caked again.

“It’s there because I want to take it upstairs later.”

“What, like in two hundred years when it cools off?”

The knob creaks when she kills the faucet. “I’m just glad you didn’t try to pick it up.”

So is Kei. He drops his arm to his side, pinky still sizzling. He glances at the offending pot. When he turns back, his mother has padded back to her table. She swoops down to inspect the central shapeless clay lump, presses her thumb to its gummy base and backs off again.

“I was wondering,” says Kei, “why you made it a cube.”

His mother straightens. She blinks robotically at him.

“You were?”

“…Yeah.”

She explains it to him, then—something about cubes symbolizing _truth_ , appearing the same from every angle—and Kei searches her face for a different truth altogether, something that glints at him and says she _knows,_ she knows about the toothpick house and the emeralds or maybe peridots and his father’s stolen face, fresh and bright like the wet clay on her table.

________________

  
“Fuck you,” Kei declares. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck _you_.”

“Don’t be such a baby.”

Yamaguchi ambles to Kageyama’s side and asks, “What’s going on?”

“Tsukishima is crying because his dainty hands are too frail for high-fives.”

“My hands aren’t dainty. You’re just too stupid to high-five correctly.”

Kei presses his hand to his chest, pinky splayed and stinging like all hell.

“He burned his finger, Kageyama,” Yamaguchi says sternly.

“Huh?”

“He burned it. Like, with fire.”

“Not literally,” adds Kei.

The first-years herd to the club room door and Kageyama waves them on.

“Oh. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“It's vital for team captains to be able to intuit these things,” Kei deadpans.

Kageyama lurches like Kei’s jabbed him with a cattle prod. “ _Really_?”

Yamaguchi cuts in, “ _No_ , Kageyama, no. But you should probably go moderate the gym.”

“Oh.” Kageyama turns to Kei. “Asshole. Hope your finger heals.”

“Thanks.”

Kageyama trudges from the room, pulling Hinata with him. Five seconds of orange afternoon light peeks through the open doorway before it’s pushed out again. Yamaguchi turns to Kei with his face and his chest and his hips and Kei turns too, focus pulled like a magnet.

“It’s like he’s at the summit of a mountain, okay, and you’re at the peak,” Yamaguchi explains, “and the only way you can interact with him is by jumping off the damn cliff. But at the same time, it’s like, well, Tsukki, you’ve gotta get to the bottom somehow.”

Kei smirks, mostly because he gets to be at the peak while Kageyama’s stuck on the ground.

“And where are you in this scenario?” he implores.

Yamaguchi considers this.

“I’m flying over the mountain in a blimp. The blimp has hot tubs. No, wait— _Jacuzzis_.”

“A _blimp_?” Kei repeats. “Is it nineteen-thirty?”

Yamaguchi barks a laugh and ducks down to dig through his bag, reemerging to push a roll of athletic tape into Kei’s good hand.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

Kei turns the tape roll in his hand, searching for its end. He straightens his pinky. It stings less today but aches more, constantly, inescapable of every task he performs. At least the searing pot didn’t burn his wrist. And his mother was right—at least he didn’t try to pick it up. He flattens the gum he chews between his teeth and pushes his tongue through it, squeezing out the last of the minty flavor before practice starts and he has to swallow it. 

Yamaguchi looks back at him with his hand on the door he’s pushed open.

“Tsukki?” he chirps.

Kei finds the end of the tape roll and peels it back. The sticky sound whispers through the room.

“Coming?” asks Yamaguchi.

Kei answers, “My mom thinks my dad is having an affair.”

He pushes out a breath. Why the fuck did he say that? He wasn’t even thinking about it.

But then maybe he was—maybe it has coated the insides of his head, a sounding board for all his other thoughts no matter how irrelevant or relevant they are and at this point only provides a background buzz he’s programmed to filter out. But it doesn’t buzz now. Now it _screams_ , shrieking and gurgling and yelping, uproariously victorious for being freed.

In the doorway, Yamaguchi shrinks. He retracts into the room and the door shuts. Kei eyes the twitching dip in his throat.

“With who?” he manages.

“I don’t know,” Kei admits. “The realtor, maybe.”

Yamaguchi’s stare floods, voice cracking. “ _Realtor?”_

“No, Yamaguchi, it’s not like that—the house is close, it’s—really, it’s nothing.”

“Oh,” he replies, “okay, but—okay, but—Tsukki.”

He studies Kei closely. Kei dulls under his analysis. His eyes drop to the floor. He should have fucking told him. He should have told Yamaguchi the second the car rolled up the squat driveway, the instant he saw the honey-colored wood trim, the moment he shook The Professional's hand. Why hadn't he told him? One of Yamaguchi’s shoes is untied, the laces flung out to either side. Kei kneels and ties it. Knot, loop, wrap, under and through. When he stands, Yamaguchi curls his hand around his arm. His touch is sweet and feather light. It leaves flecks of sugar on Kei’s skin when his arm falls back to his side.

Practice ends early. Kei waits on the road below the club room, his breath floating in front of his face. He pulls his headphone splitter from his bag when Yamaguchi finds him. He unravels the cords but Yamaguchi splays his fingers in the space between them, lip caught by his teeth. Kei stops.

“That’s okay,” Yamaguchi tells him. “Hinata and I are gonna hang out.”

“Oh.”

Gingerly, Kei rewraps the splitter. If he’s careless, it will be a nightmare to unravel next time.

“Aren’t you tired?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just kind of…” Yamaguchi pulls his hands from his pockets and shakes them out, pushing a frustrated sound through his teeth. He watches Kei tuck the splitter back into his bag, puffs a bitter cloud between them and finishes, “I just wanna stay out for a while.”

Kei agrees. Home sounds miserable. But with Yamaguchi pissed at him, here sounds worse.

________________

  
Warm late afternoon colors brush the sky and Kageyama lets him in before he knocks, swinging the door open without a word and returning to drop himself messily onto the couch. Kei follows. He opts for the floor, head aching. He spent an hour at the library before it closed and the academic silence lingers in his ears.

Kageyama’s house has a perpetual chemical smell, like someone’s been on their hands and knees scrubbing at the wall trim with bleach and acetone. It’s an element reminiscent of his own. But the stillness of the house is unparalleled—it whispers and tiptoes where Yamaguchi’s sings and stumbles and Kei’s bellows and nosedives. Kageyama’s house seems not like a home but a temporary measure, like maybe him and his parents plan to flee in the middle of the night, leaving nothing but simple wall art and scattered furniture in their wake.

Kei takes the controller from the arm of the couch and unpauses his game. 

“Are you stuck?” he asks. The avatar faces a gray dungeon wall.

“Yeah,” grunts Kageyama.

“Figures.”

“Shut up.”

Kei shoves a stack of boxes to the wall and climbs to the vaulted ledge. He smirks at the television when Kageyama scoffs but keeps the controller to himself. He’ll give it back when the soundtrack turns treacherous. Kageyama only plays video games to fight and punch and stab, anyway. Kei’s impartial to the violence.

“Yamaguchi and Hinata are hanging out,” he mentions.

“Yeah.”

Kei weaves through pillars of spikes.

“What were they doing?”

“Going to the park,” he answers, “by Hinata’s.”

The music turns menacing so Kei hands over the controller. Kageyama sits up to take it.

“Good,” Kageyama grunts after a moment. “He can’t just be around me all the time. Who knows what that would do to him.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

It’s self-deprecating and funny, but Kei can’t unbury his laugh. He watches the slaughter on the television screen and chews the inside of his cheek. Similarly, has his company tarnished Yamaguchi? How long before Kei’s own lack of color veils Yamaguchi’s neon?

“It’s your fault Yamaguchi was such an airhead at practice, isn’t it?” Kageyama accuses.

“You are in no position to call anyone else stupid.”

“Whatever. You know what I mean.”

Kei doesn’t answer. _Click-clack-click—_ Kageyama mashes buttons.

“Whatever,” he says again. “Just don’t mess him up like that before practice.”

Kei turns over his shoulder.

“What?” asks Kageyama.

“Nothing. It’s just that that’s the first responsible thing you’ve said all year.”

There’s a clobbering sound and blood sprays the dungeon walls. Kageyama groans his protest and drops the controller to the floor by Kei’s knee; the loudest sound in the quiet, chemical house. 

________________

  
Darkness drips from the roof and awnings but the living room light is on. It shines welcomingly through the front window.

“Tadashi went to bed,” Tsuru tells him, but lets him in anyways at her stepmother’s request.

Sympathy swims in Hana’s eyes. She assumes his parents goaded him here. Kei doesn’t tell her that he hasn’t even been home yet, hasn’t spoken with them since yesterday morning, has no idea what kind of shit show they’re performing today. He politely declines tea and leftovers.

Yamaguchi’s room hosts a warm, sleepy silence. It tugs at Kei’s eyelids. The room is dark save the white glow on Yamaguchi’s face, features lax as he taps at his phone. The door clicks when Kei closes it. Yamaguchi spins his phone around to illuminate him, holding it to his chest when—slow and soft, soft and slow—Kei crawls to sit by his hip.

Kei lifts his stare to the ceiling. It offers the same pitch black as any direction but he stares hard as if to see something beyond it, maybe stars or the wooden bones of the attic. Yamaguchi’s breathing quickens for a minute before it evens out. The repetition puts a scarlet static in Kei’s head. Yamaguchi listens even when Kei says nothing. Kei listens back, hears his focus, feels the gossamer weight of Yamaguchi’s undivided attention as it drapes over him like a silk sheet. He digs his fingers into the moment at hand and holds on tight. Kei wants to pour the moment into an ice tray and freeze it so he can take it out later, like he and Yamaguchi used to do with juice when they wanted popsicles.

“It’s shaped like an upright toothpick,” Kei mutters into the blackness, “the house.”

The blankets shift beneath him.

“The driveway is too small for our car. There’s a koi pond in the side yard, and the wood furnishings are the color of honey. I don’t know why, but it felt warm. It felt like a home,” he goes on. “And the first thing I did after learning the address was check how far it was from you.”

Yamaguchi’s lips click softly when they part. “How far?”

“Twenty-three minutes. Walking,” Kei answers.

Faintly, sleepily, Yamaguchi snickers.

“Not twenty-two?” he asks, slipping his arm from under the covers. “Or twenty-four?”

Yamaguchi rests his palm on Kei’s on the bed between them. Breath fluctuating, he slides their calloused skin together, damp, slow like he commits the friction to memory. Kei’s fingers twitch atop the bedspread. The scarlet static thickens until Yamaguchi settles again, the press of their palms easing off.

“Twenty-three,” Kei breathes.

“Twenty-three’s not terrible, Tsukki.”

“No. It isn’t.”

If he could drive, the distance would disappear. He could disappear with it.

“Tsukki, I, um,” Yamaguchi murmurs, voice curling gently around incoming sleep, “I was thinking about me. When you mentioned a realtor, you know. I was thinking about me and what I’d do if you moved, which was stupid. Because I should have thought about you—I’m good at that, you know, Tsukki, but—I should’ve thought of you.”

“It’s fine.”

It’s unfair that Kei occupies any space at all in his head. He wants to slip in through Yamaguchi’s mouth and rearrange it all.

“How’s your burn?” Yamaguchi wonders.

“Hurts.”

“Sorry, Tsukki.”

“No,” says Kei. “It was stupid of me. I don’t know why I touched the goddamn cube.”

Yamaguchi sighs in the dark. Kei pictures the downward curve of his mouth. The sliver of yellow light under Yamaguchi’s door flickers as someone walks past. Yamaguchi shifts their connected palms once more and Kei’s focus floats to the touch.

“No, not stupid,” Yamaguchi argues softly, skin sliding, “you were just appreciating.”


	6. gauze and butterfly bandages

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when the floodwater comes, it ain't gonna be clear  
> it's gonna look like mud.  
> but i will help you swim  
> i will help you swim  
> i'm gonna help you swim.
> 
> \- twin size mattress / the front bottoms

“Okay, my turn. A plane or a double-decker bus?”

“How the fuck would I possibly be hit by a plane?” Kei asks.

Yamaguchi stares hard at the shelves in front of him. Gravely, he turns to Kei.

“Big trampoline,” he deadpans.

Kei sputters and Yamaguchi shushes him with a box of rice crackers before he sorts it with the others. Yamaguchi doesn’t need the stepladder to reach the top shelf so Kei sits on it as Yamaguchi stocks the endcap of Shimada Mart’s snack aisle, a hungry twinge in his stomach. He skims the boxes on the middle shelf. Their colors correspond with their flavors and Kei straightens the bright green one Yamaguchi’s apron knocks askew.

“‘New salad flavor,’” he reads aloud, “‘now with added chive and avocado’.”

Yamaguchi hums. “You’d be surprised how often people buy those.”

“More often than the tuna flavor?”

“It’s about the same, actually.”

“‘Fresh new look, same great taste,’” Kei adds.

“You should be their spokesperson, Tsukki.”

He pulls a lonely packet of fruit snacks from their peg. The packaging features a strawberry and a banana sharing an umbrella in a downpour of shiny purple grapes. He shows it to Yamaguchi who nods thoughtfully like Kei shows him an artifact he's suddenly dug up from the ground.

Kei says, “I’d rather be the spokesperson for these.”

“You want them? I’ll get you them.”

“The packaging makes me not want them.”

“Why?” Yamaguchi asks, leaning closer. “Is it because the banana has eyelashes?”

“That’s a big part of it.”

He wheels his cart to the freezers on the adjacent wall. Kei follows, dragging the stepladder behind him. He ducks his head when Shimada glances around the corner. Yamaguchi holds open the freezer door with his elbow—goosebumps erupt on Kei’s skin—and pushes box after box onto the frosty shelves.

“It’s already a sentient banana,” Yamaguchi reasons. “I don’t see the harm in adding some eyelashes, you know?”

He should wear long sleeves when he stocks the freezers. If it takes him long enough, he could get sick. Then Kei would get sick because they’d both refuse to take the appropriate measures to avoid each other. Kei tells him this much and Yamaguchi shrugs and tugs at the string of Kei’s jacket so it flies up and swats his chin.

“Hey, look,” chirps Yamaguchi as Kei tucks the strings under his collar so he can’t get them, “remember these things, Tsukki? We used to do that thing where we’d freeze juice in ice cube trays when we wanted these. When we were too little to walk to the store alone, I mean. Remember?”

Kei blinks at the icy popsicle box—no inane design, no eyelashes, no umbrellas.

“I thought about that the other day.”

Yamaguchi scratches the frost off the glass with his fingernails and grins at him through the freezer door. “You did? Why?”

Kei and Yamaguchi sat in the dark, voices cradled in a sleepy cadence, and simply coexisted.

“I don’t remember,” Kei tells him.

“Well, if it comes back to you,” says Yamaguchi, gazing right through him, “let me know.”

Kei’s cold despite his jacket by the time he finishes the freezers and they move to the front of the store, to the candy displays beneath the register. Yamaguchi mentions the popsicles to Shimada, how they’d make their own and how he’d pull a kitchen chair up to the refrigerator because he was half Kei’s height. Kei cleans his glasses with his sleeve as Shimada laughs. With the way he allows Kei to hang around his shop during Yamaguchi’s shifts, Kei should laugh with him, jovial. He should be nice and buy things and kiss his ass. But he looks at Kei oddly sometimes, from the corner of his eye like he knows something he shouldn’t. Kei gets the prickly feeling that he talks to Yamaguchi about him when he isn’t there. But about _what?_

“Hey, so,” Yamaguchi says when they’re alone again. “Mom’s birthday is next week.”

“I know.”

“So you’ll be with me?”

Kei lifts his stare from his phone. “Of course.”

“Good,” breathes Yamaguchi, “okay.”

Tension slips from his shoulders. Kei eyes where the strap of his apron bends around his neck, the skin underneath pink and tender. He leans forward and pulls it down so it lies on his shirt collar instead. Yamaguchi thanks him, fingertips smoothing over where Kei’s had skimmed his skin.

“We should make those fake popsicles again,” he suggests.

“Sure.”

Kei will chew their wooden sticks until Yamaguchi confiscates them.

“Tonight?” Yamaguchi asks.

“Yamaguchi, it’s zero degrees outside.”

“So we won’t even have to use the freezer,” he retorts, grinning proudly. “We’ll just set the trays on your balcony.”

________________

  
Sometimes Kei finds himself thinking about Yamaguchi’s biological mother.

It happens during small, intermediate moments like subject switches in school or checkout lines or drying dishes after dinner. Would she like him? Would she let him hang around her house the way he does at Hana’s? What would she think of Yamaguchi’s younger siblings? Is she responsible for Yamaguchi’s height? It certainly isn’t his father’s doing. It seems ludicrous to think so much so deeply about a woman that Kei never knew, a woman that _Yamaguchi_ barely knew but still permeates so much of his life and self that, just maybe, it would be ludicrous _not_ to. 

Will Kei’s own parents look shinier encased in memory? Will the time his mother baked all his father’s ties in the kiln become suddenly charming when she dies? Or the time his father tossed the bedroom television into the lap pool? 

Kei watches them shuffle around the kitchen from the living room, headphones thumping with the synth-pop tracks Akiteru advocates. One of the bulbs is out in the crystal light fixture above the kitchen table. His mother points to it. They regard it for a moment and his father nods.

With effort, he pulls one of the bar stools around the counter and situates it beneath the fixture but halts when his mother slaps a hand to the side of her face, mouth dropped open. She waves wildly at the marble tile. His father steps back and presents the bar stool to her like a used car salesman, his arms flung out to either side. Their mouths form around bloated words. His mother ducks beneath the counter and resurfaces with a dish towel, wringing it in her hand. His father shakes his head. He plants his hands on his hips. His mother _fumes,_ grabs her hair between her fingers and marches from the room.

Kei’s phone blips to the next song.

His father kneels to inspect the tile. He stands a moment later and drops himself onto the stool, out of place in the center of the kitchen. He pulls his phone from his breast pocket only to stuff it back in a moment later. He scrubs a hand over his face, staring up at the one burnt out bulb.

________________

  
The bar stool stays in the kitchen for three days. They weave around it like it’s part of the house, like it’s always been there, this odd central structure erected from marble and steel.

On the evening of the third day, it’s back at the high counter. Kei stops short in the doorway at its absence from the kitchen. Yamaguchi slams into his back with a yip before curling around his shoulder, following his stare. Kei’s father does the same from where he sits in the overstuffed living room chair after he and Yamaguchi greet each other, short and sweet.

“You moved the stool back,” Kei voices.

“I thought you did,” replies his father.

He says he needs to talk to him and Yamaguchi ducks out, heading down the hall.

“What?” Kei asks.

His father wonders, “Is it snowing yet?”

“No.”

“Oh. It’s supposed to this week or next, they said.”

The heater blasts. The last of the winter chill drips from Kei’s skin. He shrugs out of his jacket and hooks it on the coat rack by the door. Practice ended late. He desperately wants to wash the dried sweat from his face. Pressing a cool hand to his icy cheek, Kei sighs.

“Cold out there?”

“Is this what you needed me for?”

His father waves him closer.

“We have another house visit at the beginning of next week. I—we—need to make a decision,” he rumbles. 

“When?”

“Tuesday.”

Kei rubs at his burnt pinky with his opposite thumb. “I can’t.”

“Why the hell not? Kei, this is important.”

“I have plans,” he says. His father scoffs, incredulous. Kei guesses that’s fair. He glances at the mouth of the hallway down which Yamaguchi disappeared. “It’s his mom’s birthday.”

“So invite him.”

“What, to the house?”

“Yes. To the house.”

“I’m going to my room now.”

His father doesn’t stop him. Ironclad steps take Kei down the hall.

Yamaguchi lies face down, sprawled over Kei’s bed like a starfish. Kei doesn’t announce himself. He shuts the door, drops his bag onto his desk chair and sits on top of him, knees astride his back. Yamaguchi huffs a groan and wiggles underneath his weight.

“Tsukki,” he gasps with effort, “you’re sitting on my butt.”

“Is it okay?”

“Uh, I mean—I’m not gonna lie and tell you it doesn’t feel _good_.” Stiff, Yamaguchi waits for his reply. Kei blinks at his back. The sole bedside lamp illuminates the room, dimly, solemnly, making shadows crawl over the folds and puckers of Yamaguchi’s t-shirt. Yamaguchi presses his hands to the sides of his head and frets into the mattress, “Oh my god, that was supposed to be kind of facetious, Tsukki, you were supposed to laugh or huff or at least roll your eyes—”

“Even if I had rolled my eyes, how would you know?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve got a sixth sense for that.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, mhm,” he hums. “It’s a total sixth sense thing. You know how some animals can sense storms? I’m the same way, but with your eye rolls. I feel it in my _gut._ Except the storm is in your eyes, Tsukki—see how poetic I can get? Anyway, the point is that I just _know._ ”

Kei closes his eyes. He shoves his heart to the bottom of his ribcage and leans forward, back in a painful arch, pressing his forehead to the smooth plane between Yamaguchi’s shoulder blades. The flush on his face cancels out the warmth of Yamaguchi’s skin. Through his shirt, he radiates.

“What’s wrong?”

Yamaguchi’s voice has flipped to sincere, soft, soothing. How is it so easy for him?

“Tsukki?” he murmurs.

“My dad is shoving the other house down my throat,” Kei rumbles. “I can’t breathe.” Its toothpick stature pokes and prods at him, tearing pinprick holes Kei seeps out of. He digs his fingers into the denim of his jeans. 

Quietly, Yamaguchi mentions, “I thought you liked the house?”

“I did. I do.”

“It’s just a lot,” he finishes for him. Kei nods against his back.

Languidly, he lifts himself from him. He drops his volleyball bag to the floor to sit in his desk chair. Yamaguchi sits up too, scooting to the middle of the bed. Kei watches the opposite wall. Yamaguchi watches Kei. The lamplight shines sharp and golden across the walls and Yamaguchi turns from him, frowning at the crack in the bedroom window.

What would Yamaguchi look at if it wasn’t there? What if Akiteru had never cracked the glass? What if the broadcasting company had featured an Egyptian special that day instead of the Medieval one that aired? Would Akiteru have asked their parents for a cat? Would they have bought him one if he did? What if Yamaguchi hadn’t cried when the lamp crashed to the floor, its spine irreparably bent? What if he’d laughed instead?

________________

  
Yamaguchi falls asleep before he finishes his homework. Kei slips loose-leaf pages out from beneath his face, carefully like his freckles might adhere to the paper and peel off like stickers. He pulls an open textbook out from beneath Yamaguchi’s crooked arm and stacks what he’s collected on the nightstand. Sentiment pulls at him with sticky hands. It pulls at him _deep—_ would yank him from the ground if Kei weren’t so utterly dense. 

He’s besotted.

He kills the lamp but leaves the door ajar when he leaves his bedroom. The hallway light leaks in, spilling over Yamaguchi’s socked feet and Kei finds his father still rooted to his armchair. The television flickers in the dark. The changing light rolls over his face. He doesn’t watch it. He doesn’t even face it, head turned to the art on the wall Kei’s mother gave him when he turned forty. She painted it herself. The television flashes and his father looks to him suddenly as if it was Kei who shone so bright, white and sparkling at the edge of the room’s rolling darkness.

Kei sits on the arm of the couch. He steeples his fingers in his lap.

“The toothpick house,” he mutters, leering at the floor, “is it really for being prepared?” Leather groans as his father shifts in his chair. Kei hadn’t noticed that the television is muted, its light and colors shouting in sound’s place. He shifts too, closing the space between his feet. “Or are you really thinking of…”

His father leans forward and pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“Kei, it’s late.”

“That’s all I get?”

He takes his hands away. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know,” Kei admits.

Blankly, they watch the muted television. Kei pushes his glasses into his hair and rubs at his eyes, sore from the contrast. His fingertips are numb on his skin and like it reads his mind, the heater buzzes to life. His father rises stiffly from his chair. He sets the television remote on the couch cushion nearest Kei.

“We have a walkthrough of the house on Tuesday,” he reports. “I already told you Tadashi can join us. I would prefer you be there.”

He tells Kei goodnight and grabs his shoulder. His grip is firm but fleeting—the harmless but poignant grip of a business partner or a coach. He pauses as he walks through the kitchen to toe at a scuff on the marble and then drags himself, head shaking, down the dark hallway.

________________

  
Kei and Yamaguchi don’t attend classes on Tuesday.

Neither does Tsuru; Kei hears her from the foyer. He flips the spare key between his fingers—no one heeded the doorbell—and steps back onto the porch to replace it beneath the birdbath. Grit has formed beneath its porcelain base, black and coarse around a key-shaped divot.

He traces the chaos down the hall. Besides it, the quiet roams the house on tiptoes. Kei flattens his palm on Yamaguchi’s door and pushes it open—empty. Another bout draws Kei back into the hall and around the corner until he stands in front of Tsuru’s door, lip caught between his teeth. Their shouts spike the walls, the ceilings, the door. Kei backs into the wall for fear of collateral damage.

“So you’re just gonna go? Again?” accuses Tsuru, whining like a teapot on a heat coil. “You _always_ do this.”

“Do what? Spend today with the one person who makes it better?”

“I’m your sister. _I’m_ supposed to make it better.”

“Yeah,” Yamaguchi swiftly agrees, “you are.”

Kei rubs his thumb back and forth, forth and back over the raised skin on his pinky.

“You’re a fucking moron.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t go to school, Tsuru. But isn’t Hiroji coming later?”

“ _Later_ ,” she emphasizes.

Her squat little boyfriend standing on the porch with a fat bouquet of white roses—Kei fails to picture it.

“Move,” says Yamaguchi. “Tsukki’s gonna be here soon.”

Tsuru growls back, “I can’t believe you’re choosing _him_ over me. _Again_.”

“Tsuru, _move_.”

“I’m so fucking sick of it,” she roars. “Just because you want to _fuck_ him or whatever.”

When Tsuru fights, she fights dirty. 

Kei holds his breath, feels himself turn blue.

“You know it’s not that,” Yamaguchi warbles through the stretching silence. “Why would you even say that?”

“Tadashi, I—don’t cry. Don’t cry, um…”

Kei’s insides liquefy. They trickle over his veins and drench his muscles, pooling in the soles of his feet. They swish and splash as he walks through the house and outside, where the winter air bites hard. He sits on the freezing cement of Yamaguchi’s front porch until his legs are numb. The grit isn’t noticeable when the birdbath stands upright. It’s only when it’s tipped over that one sees the decay, festering beneath chipped porcelain, hidden away from the light.

Is he really the one person who makes it better? If so, why hasn’t Yamaguchi told him? Why conceal a purpose Kei so severely needs? He drags his nails over the cement in wide, slow semicircles. If Yamaguchi’s mother were alive, how would her family celebrate this day? Maybe they would hold a grand party, something like the ones Hana throws for her children and her own. Maybe they would travel to the city for a dinner in her honor. Maybe she would invite Kei.

Yamaguchi sighs his name, his _real_ name, on a breath of relief.

Kei tips his chin to stare up at him. He feels thin, a dryer sheet to Yamaguchi’s static. Yamaguchi doesn’t wait for him to create space, just sits at his side on the porch, bodies overlapping like a Venn diagram. Kei stares at the loose laces of Yamaguchi’s sneakers. They will him to tie them tight—knot, loop, wrap, under and through—but Kei, like stubborn ivy, roots himself to the cement. Yamaguchi reaches up and pulls the front door shut. The slam vibrates at their backs. Yamaguchi scuffs his sneakers over the cool cement with a scratchy sound and Kei runs his tongue over his teeth, the familiar ruggedness of his molars and the smooth, dull point of his canines.

Yamaguchi pushes a stick of gum into his hand.

“Yamaguchi,” says Kei. “You aren’t a fucking moron.”

Yamaguchi nods. “Yeah, I am.”

“Me too, then.”

The soles of his shoes scratch and scrape over the porch.

“The door was unlocked,” he mentions, “so I know you came in.”

Kei glances at the birdbath. Yamaguchi’s hands ball into fists in his lap.

“I’m not choosing anybody over anybody,” he tells himself. “It’s just—different.”

Anchoring his arms around his legs, Yamaguchi drops his forehead to his knees. Neither of them mention Tsuru’s last barb. Blood seeps from Yamaguchi still and Kei watches it pool onto the concrete, swift and bright like milk on marble. But they don’t mention it. It’s easier to gaze at the planets than the sun itself. Kei’s heart slows its steady climb up his throat.

“There’s a showing at the house today.”

Yamaguchi lifts his head. “Toothpick house?”

Kei nods. Yamaguchi presses his weak grin to his wrist, skin splotchy beneath his freckles.

“Want to come?”

“Do you want me to?”

Kei nods again.

“Then I’ll come.”

________________  
  


The Professional is delighted with the additional company. She presses a hand to her chest, the other outstretched toward Yamaguchi. Kei’s father wears his stolen face. Kei hovers outside of the triangle they form and chews his flavorless gum. The Professional hands his father another packet of papers, this one thicker than the last.

“I like your earrings,” Yamaguchi tells her.

He and Kei wander the house on their own. It’s familiar when Yamaguchi checks the windows for cracks, when he insists they test to see if they both fit in the bathtub, when he skims his fingers over the walls of the narrow upstairs hallway as they walk. It’s familiar like this is the second time it’s happened.

“I thought you said there was a showing,” says Yamaguchi, checking the water pressure in the bathroom sink. “It’s just us here, Tsukki.”

“I don’t know real estate jargon.”

“You’d be a godawful realtor.”

“Yeah.”

“Handsome, but godawful.”

Kei worried the house would be different. He worried he’d seen it wrong the first time and, upon returning, would find the bedrooms crowded next to one another and the guest bathroom erected scandalously on the roof. But the house still glows—warmer even, like it aims to impress.

“It’s _huge_ ,” Yamaguchi gushes. “Why are there so many bedrooms?”

Yamaguchi glows, too. He left blood on his porch and in the car but each room sews him back up. Kei waits nearby with gauze and butterfly bandages. The stitches will burst later when Yamaguchi gets home. But Kei will be there too, waiting nearby with gauze and butterfly bandages.

“This is the bedroom you’d take, isn’t it, Tsukki?”

“Yeah.”

“No balcony,” Yamaguchi mentions.

“I use my balcony maybe twice a year.”

He skirts around the room, inspecting. “Where would your bed go?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Liar.”

“Alright,” Kei admits. “Under one of the windows.”

Yamaguchi slides along the wall and situates himself beneath the far window.

“So your bed would be here,” he assesses.

“I suppose.”

He drags his socked foot in a circle and promptly lies down on the floor.

“What a good bed,” he sighs. When Kei lies next to him, he adds, “Oh. Even better now.”

Kei jabs him in the stomach with his pointer finger and Yamaguchi curls onto his side, barking with laughter, shaggy hair fanned messily over the hardwood. Kei turns on his side to face him. Wrist pressed to his ear, his pulse booms. Yamaguchi stares somewhere behind Kei’s head.

Soft and conversational, he tells him, “My mom would’ve liked this house.”

Softer, Kei answers, “Would she have?”

“Yeah. Because of all the wood.”

“It’s beautiful.”

Yamaguchi nods. “Dad went into construction after she died, you know, because he wanted to be around it. Because she loved it so much.”

Kei knows. He doesn’t stop him, though. He wouldn’t for anything. Their bones dig into the wood paneling and yet the soft disclosure makes him _feel_ like they’re on a bed. Gentle, close, tiptoeing on the blurred boundary of sleep. Through the smallest gap between his teeth, Kei sees the press of Yamaguchi’s pink tongue when he pronounces his D’s.

“I don’t know, I guess—we don’t see it like he gets to, you know—all rough and unpolished like that. As separate parts of a whole. As pieces of something bigger. But it’s almost always hidden beneath other things, Tsukki. Paint or drywall or paper. Wood is just bones, Tsukki. But she loved it so much.”

To love even things colorless, flat and mundane, to love mere bones—Yamaguchi gets this from her. Kei’s ribcage locks tight around his heart. His gaze drifts to the wood trim on the far side of the empty room. He wants to say his affinity for the honeyed wood that coats the house, lining each room and dripping from its grand architecture, is a result of Yamaguchi’s words and memories. But, staring, latent wires connect with a pretty spark.

The wood within the house is the color of Yamaguchi’s skin.

Yamaguchi offers all the color and structure Kei lacks and Kei simmers beneath the heat of clarity, knowing himself irrevocably selfish for the home he’s built inside him; inside his bones, muscle and skin; coated with sunlight, kissed silly by it, tawny, golden and familiar.


	7. harp strings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm terrified of what i lack inside me.
> 
> \- boxelder / motion city soundtrack

Tsuru doesn’t look at Kei for a week.

“They sleep up to twenty hours a day,” reports Kei, folded into himself on Yamaguchi’s bed. “Wish I could do that.”

“You almost do that.”

“Shut up.”

“Gimme another, Tsukki.”

“Less than ten percent of their hunts end successfully.”

Yamaguchi whines, “That makes me sad.”

“Here’s another: they kill their prey by suffocation.”

He taps his pen against his desk. “A bite to the neck?”

“A bite to the neck,” Kei confirms.

“ _No_ ,” Yamaguchi wails, curling his hands around his neck, “it’s like I can _feel_ it!”

“If you were to do that, you’d just lose your hands too.”

“ _There’s no escape!”_

“Nope.”

Yamaguchi wails and gurgles and Tsuru manifests in the doorway, pierces them both with her glare and slams the door shut. Yamaguchi blinks at it, his hands dropping into his lap. Kei stares at the pale imprints he’s left on his neck as they fade into his sandy skin.

Kei’s fingers are longer but Yamaguchi’s hands are wider, so much wider than his but gentle, like he perpetually handles Fabergé eggs. Kei used to be careful like that. Now he drops things for no reason: pens, books, his cell phone, his house keys. Yamaguchi has handed him one thousand Fabergé eggs and Kei has shattered every single one. Kei studies his fingers. They glare pale against his black pants and he tips his head up again to eye Yamaguchi; his chestnut hair is the most complementary color to their ghostly white. 

“Yamaguchi, come over here.”

Yamaguchi turns his way and smacks his hands to his neck again. “Why? So you can bite my neck?” Then he drops his ear to his shoulder and decides, “Wait, that actually doesn’t sound half bad.”

Kei’s teeth purr in his gums. They agree.

“I was going to play with your hair.”

Yamaguchi sits up bone straight. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Okay, Tsukki. I mean, if you _insist._ ”

He leaps from the desk chair and settles himself on his knees between Kei’s legs.

“Don’t _face_ me,” Kei tells him, but digs his fingers through his hair anyway.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because I said so.”

“What,” Yamaguchi laughs, tipping his head into the touch, “are you my parent?”

“ _No_.”

“Good. That would be weird.”

“Yes,” Kei responds, successfully distracted. Yamaguchi’s hair has always been the same. Hana has tried every effort to switch it up but this is how it remains: straight, shaggy, thin but full with layer upon layer upon layer, smooth as Kei threads his fingers through it. He curls the sides behind Yamaguchi’s ears. He pushes his bangs from his forehead and gives attention to the faint freckles that hide eternally beneath them. “It would be.”

Kei buries his fingertips in Yamaguchi’s lank hair. Soft, so soft—after practice, he showered before Kei did. It’s had time to dry fully while Kei’s still sits damp on his head. He flattens his fingers over the curve of Yamaguchi’s scalp and inches them toward him, away from him, toward him, watching Yamaguchi’s hair twitch and flinch atop his fingers. His pale skin peeks through downy strands of chestnut. Kei buries his fingers further until he can’t see them anymore. 

Yamaguchi’s mouth is slack, his eyes closed like he plans to sleep. He forgets to monitor his breathing when Kei does this. The only sound in the room, it infiltrates Kei’s head like rainwater heads for dips in concrete. Yamaguchi breathes deep and long. It’s more like sighing than anything—slow, melodic and drawn-out—and Kei glances away every single time Yamaguchi’s breath hitches from his fingers.

His stare flicks downward when Yamaguchi’s hand finds his leg. Kei relaxes his jaw and runs his tongue over the backs of his incisors. He watches Yamaguchi’s face for a change. Kei smoothes his fingertips down and around, rubbing and softly scratching where Yamaguchi’s hair tapers off at the top of his neck. Goosebumps speckle Yamaguchi’s skin. Almost playful, Kei tugs the fine, downy strands between his fingers. Yamaguchi’s head falls gently back. His hand crawls further up Kei’s thigh, up, up, _dangerously_ close to his dick only to inch back down again, his exhale jagged, and Kei clamps the inside of his cheek between his teeth and counts to five.

“Yamaguchi,” he breathes at three, hating the frailty of his own voice.

“Mm?” hums Yamaguchi.

He straightens and pulls his hand back to his own lap. He blinks at Kei with tired eyes.

“Um—nothing,” Kei decides.

Like Yamaguchi, he brings his hands back to himself. Yamaguchi grins at him out of habit and pushes a yawn into the back of his hand. It makes Kei yawn too. Their breathing yells through the silent vacuum of the room, mixing in the space between them, Yamaguchi still grinning down at Kei because he sits up on his knees. Kei stares up at his freckled forehead. Yamaguchi probably won’t right his hair anytime soon from how Kei has smoothed it back.

He has played with Yamaguchi’s hair sporadically since they were fifteen. Yamaguchi has always liked it a little _too_ much.

Maybe that’s why Kei keeps playing with his goddamn hair.

________________

  
Kei stares between his parents like they’ve sprouted tails overnight.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” his mother wonders.

“Why are you sitting on the same side of the table?”

“It’ll get cold,” she adds.

Kei sits opposite them like he's arrived for an interview. The steam from his hot plate of food wobbles when he exhales. His father taps at his cell phone, holding it in his right hand; the hand furthest from Kei’s mother. He shaved again. There’s a nick on his jawbone that shifts when he chews. Kei tells him he should be more careful and his father grunts, preoccupied. His phone pings and Kei hears the tiniest click as he switches off his alerts.

Next to him, his mother swaps around her rings. She reaches for her wine and the loose opal on her pinky clacks against the glass's thin stem. Chopsticks swirl over glazed earthenware plates. They haven’t used them in years. Kei’s mother made them herself, poured her time and technique into the very minerals and soil from which the clay was conceived. But the plates are ugly. Their color is dull, like dirt. It makes even the most impressive meals look like they were scooped from the hearth with a spatula and presented with contempt. 

His mother bumps his father with her elbow as she cuts her vegetables—she’s left-handed—and Kei pictures Akiteru in the vacant chair next to him because this is how his parents used to sit back then, one hundred timelines ago, back when he and his brother were enough for them. 

Kei despises his parents for the years they stalled between their sons.

“Put down your damn phone.”

“Jesus. I’m _working_.”

Does Yamaguchi feel the same regarding his siblings? Does he wish his father and stepmother had Misashi years earlier so they could easily relate? Six years stretch out between them, just like Akiteru and Kei. Is it difficult for them? Has it ever been? What bridges such an insurmountable gap? Six years stretch like taffy between Kei and his brother. Sticky to the touch, they can’t get rid of them. Viscous time oozes and adheres in the space between them and Kei does nothing but stare. Akiteru stares helplessly back at him from the other end. 

What bridges such an insurmountable gap?

________________

  
It first snows at two thirty-six in the morning on a Sunday and Kei hates the moment it freeze-dries in his head.

“It isn’t your business,” booms his father. “And quit opening my mail.”

He rapidly slaps the door to Akiteru’s old bedroom. Kei used to love how it was so close to his own room; he didn’t have to drag his toys, his crayons, and his books through the house to show them off to his brother. He only had to have Yamaguchi hold up the hem of his shirt so Kei could pile his mass of belongings in the concave fabric before traipsing proudly across the hall with him in tow. Back then, Akiteru’s bedroom could not exist close enough.

But now Kei wishes he could transport it to another house completely, or fling it haphazardly into space.

“It wasn’t addressed to _you_ ,” screeches his mother. Her voice is clear like she squats on her hands and knees and shouts through the crack beneath the door. “It was addressed to the _family_ —what? I’m not part of that anymore, is that what you’re getting at?”

Kei swivels back and forth in his desk chair.

“I didn’t say any such thing,” replies his father.

“You didn’t have to— _the letter did_.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kei tells the crossword on his desk at the very same time his father says it out in the hall, nose pressed to the guest room door. His father continues, “I wouldn’t know what the mail says. I haven’t _seen_ it because you’ve holed up with it in that goddamn bedroom.”

“Goddamn you.”

“Goddamn _you_ , give me my fucking mail.”

Back and forth, forth and back like an iron ball between steel rackets. Back and forth, forth and back until the crashing din worms its way into Kei’s head and the black and white boxes on his crossword look the same, his handwriting someone else’s. He slips mutely from his bedroom. Kei pauses at the mouth of the hallway to watch his mother cram the mail under the guest room door letter by letter. Crouched on the floor, his father collects the bent envelopes in the crook of his arm.

Kei splays his hands on the kitchen table. His eyes slide around the sides of the triangle they form. He drums his fingertips on the tabletop. He picks at the cuticle of his thumbnail until it bleeds, staring up at the single dark bulb that has yet to be replaced. It takes him four minutes to fix, and this is if he includes the three minutes he spends searching for spare bulbs.

The kitchen’s too bright now, too sterile. If he knocked out two bulbs, would his parents notice?

The slam of a door resounds through the sterile house and Kei’s mother slinks into the kitchen a moment later. Kei doesn’t look up from triangle he’s once again formed on the tabletop but he feels her at his back, even minutes before she sets a cool, pointless hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t know what to do about your father,” she sighs. “He says he golfs on the weekends, Kei. But the course is fifteen minutes away—I know this—and the miles on his car reflect less than a _quarter_ of that. What’s so close, Kei? Who’s so close?”

“Mom. These are inane details.”

“I don’t know what to do about your father,” she says again.

“Divorce him.”

“There isn’t much more that I can do, or that I can take.”

“Divorce him,” Kei repeats.

His mother’s hand presses his shoulder. “I hope you’re never in a relationship like this, Kei.”

Kei stares at his pink cuticle and says, “I won’t be.”

His mother recoils. Her hand hovers above his shoulder. With her so close to his ear, Kei hears the scratchy slide of her dry skin as she curls her fingers into her palm.

“It’s not my fault, Kei. What,” she implores, voice flecked with the offense she’d taken, “you think it will be easier because you’ll both be men?”

A low, sonorous hum infiltrates the kitchen. Had the stereo in his room turned on? Had Kei left the volume turned to its highest point and neglected to insert a tape, allowing a sound between sounds to blare through the house at this very moment, sending the hairs on his arms up on their ends?

“What?” Kei utters.

He looks up at his mother. She gnaws at her thumbnail, staring hard at the refrigerator. It’s stainless steel. Magnets don’t stick to it. Yamaguchi’s fridge is magnetic, allowing the front of it to be emblazoned with photographs and good grades and a mini, animal-themed calendar. They cross off the dates as they pass.

“I want some tea,” his mother mumbles around her thumbnail. “Do you want some tea?”

“Fuck your fucking tea,” Kei tells her.

She stares at him for a moment, pats his back and trails from the kitchen without another word.

________________

  
The snow doesn’t stop. It falls through the night and morning. It coats the streets, trees and rooftops and the branches outside Kei’s cracked bedroom window snap beneath its weight and plummet to the powder below. On his walk alone to school, too late to go with Yamaguchi, Kei’s headphones double as earmuffs.

People spill rock salt over their porches and driveways to melt the newly-developed ice. Table salt works quicker. Kei pictures molecules detaching, spinning away from one another as ice softens to water, then binding again as the water cools in the biting winter air. Freckles of wet cement poke through sheets of sparkling snow where salt does its job. Kei slows his steps where black asphalt glistens deceptively.

“You’re late,” chides Kageyama.

“Just be lucky I haven’t asphyxiated myself with the net.”

“Okay.”

“It means strangled.”

“I _know_ what it means. Did you wake up late?”

Kei swaps out his glasses for his sports goggles and says, “I haven’t slept yet.”

“Does Yamaguchi know about this?”

“He’s not my handler,” he snaps.

Kageyama blinks. Practice carries merrily on behind him.

“Whatever,” he says finally. “If you get tired, sit out for a minute.”

Kei’s head nods on its own. From the edge of the court, Yamaguchi pantomimes. He bites the pin from a grenade and tosses it Kei’s way before recoiling, arm thrown over his eyes. After a moment, he peeks at him. Kei, too, recoils from the explosion. He presses his palms over his ears.

Yamaguchi beams, delighted.

________________

  
“Since when am I not your handler?”

“Yamaguchi, drop it.”

“No, seriously,” Yamaguchi presses, “I wanna know.”

“It’s not a compliment, Yamaguchi.”

“Well, maybe not. But I’d still like the title.”

Kei sighs. He hangs his backpack from the peg on his bedroom wall. Yamaguchi swiftly does the same, dropping the strap over the middle peg so their bags touch. They bump and sway and settle. Kei swipes his fingers over the soft white duvet; he’s thought about his bed all day. He plucks at a feather that pokes through the fabric.

“Fine, Yamaguchi,” he huffs, lying down. “You may have whatever title you wish.”

Yamaguchi sits at the edge of Kei’s bed. He creates the slightest dip.

“You _must_ be tired. That’s the third time you’ve used my name in the same conversation.”

“I use your name plenty.”

“Sure,” Yamaguchi drawls.

Kei pushes his face into white fabric. His glasses protest with a creak. 

“Yamaguchi Tadashi. Yamaguchi Tadashi, Yamaguchi Tadashi. There—is that enough?”

“I’m not gonna put a quota on you calling me by my name, Tsukki.”

“Maybe I should.”

“ _Hey!”_

Kei hides his grin in his pillow. Yamaguchi moves so his lower back presses to Kei’s hip. Their clothing shuffles together as Kei turns onto his back and observes the pale glow on the ceiling from the stark sheet of snow over the backyard. Yamaguchi studies the frost that invades the bottom inch of the window. Kei yearns to explain the science behind it.

His tired eyes affix to the darkest freckle on the bridge of Yamaguchi’s nose. It glares from the others, some centimeters above Yamaguchi’s right nostril. It isn’t quite circular. Most freckles aren’t. It’s oblong; a fleck of paint slung from a wet brush. It looks accidental rather than predestined, serendipitous rather than coded into his very being from the moment he rose from zero, all at once gathering shape and light and stardust. Yamaguchi’s freckles polarize to his extremities. Kei swears they pool to the points of his elbows when he bends his arms, flood into the tip of his nose when he leans over, gather at his knees when he sits. 

Idly, Yamaguchi picks at the quills of feathers that come through the bed’s duvet. He plucks one, then another, and the third pulls a few more out with it. Kei doesn’t chide him. He just watches Yamaguchi scoop them into his cupped palm and walk the fluffy mass of white and gray to the tiny mesh trash bin beneath the desk. He overturns his hand and the feathers glide off graciously.

Yamaguchi pauses, kneeling. “Hey. What’s in your trash?”

“Probably trash.”

A few slight, sharp sounds and Yamaguchi straightens. He turns on his heel. Kei sits up.

In his splayed hands, Yamaguchi cradles broken ceramic pieces of deep, deep blue.

“Oh,” says Kei.

Setting the wedges of the smashed ocarina in the trash bin he never uses is the closest Kei got to throwing it out. The mess glares at him, irritated at his negligence. It’s obliterated but Yamaguchi stares like it’s whole again, shiny and new, enthralled even as it coats his palms in white dust and chipped azure pieces.

“This was it, wasn’t it?” he implores. “My birthday gift?”

He shimmies the pieces into one hand so he can poke at them with the other. Yamaguchi slides his fingertip over the smooth blue glaze, tracing the jagged edges, circling the openings, scraping his nail softly against the unpainted insides of the instrument.

“Be careful,” Kei warns, “it’s sharp.”

Yamaguchi looks at him. “I want to keep it.”

“It’s broken.”

“So?”

“It’s dangerous. Especially in your house.”

Yamaguchi shakes his head and sits at the edge of Kei’s bed again. Broken pieces shift in his palm. He turns to Kei, grinning warmly and Kei finds it useless to loosen the ties that pull him closer when all they want to do is fucking tighten, taut and strong like the string on a bow but less dangerous, more composed—like the strings that festoon a harp and make it sing.

“I can file down the sharp edges,” Yamaguchi mentions over his shoulder. “I’ll file them—”

Kei cuts him off with a kiss. Yamaguchi responds at once, his soft mouth pressing back.

“Yes,” he breathes, pushing the words into Kei’s mouth, “oh my god, Tsukki, _yes!”_

Kei twists his fingers into the bedspread at his sides and tilts his head so their noses won’t bump again, but Yamaguchi does too and Kei tilts back until they get it right. With their faces so close, Kei feels the pink warmth of his innate flush. Yamaguchi’s lips aren’t chapped like his. They aren’t torn from errant, idle teeth. Yamaguchi is _soft_ , just like when he sleeps but he’s so awake, so very much in bloom as he kisses Kei back, mouth soft like petals and cotton and every single gentle thing that contradicts the sharpness in Kei; all the velvet and silk he lacks. Yamaguchi kisses him _fast,_ eager _,_ as if to use up every bit of Kei before he fades. He slows with the sigh Kei breathes into him, though, and grins and grins until they can barely kiss through it.

Where they meet thrums with life. It’s _alive—_ not half-alive the way Kei inches through the year and each one before it, not fleeting like a glance toward the crack in a window, not blindsiding like the time his father’s receptionist kissed him in the company copy room when he was fifteen.

Pressing close, Yamaguchi quickens again. Kei's glasses press into his face. He didn’t have the foresight to take them off. Damp clicks drip from their mouths, detaching and returning again, connecting, welding, sliding and loving. Yamaguchi’s pace sends goosebumps over Kei’s arms. Feeling him shiver, Yamaguchi shifts into him, full palms still cupped incidentally between them. Clay shards dig into Kei’s chest—he feels them, if just barely—and retracts from their honed edges.

Yamaguchi follows his glare to the offending ceramic in his hands.

“I should have put this all down,” he whines suddenly, jostling the pieces, “ _why didn’t I put it down?”_

Blood careens beneath Kei’s skin. It can’t find its way to his wild heart quick enough. His fingers ache from his iron grip on the duvet and he curls them into his palm and out again. Yamaguchi presses his free hand to his chest, heaving hard breaths in the space between them.

Kei asks, “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” Yamaguchi pants. “Yeah. Better than. Best.”

His cupped hands rest in his lap. The shattered ocarina clinks softly.

“Can you hear that?” he asks, going still.

Kei listens. “What?”

“My heart, Tsukki.”

Yamaguchi’s heart hammers in his chest; robin wings battering the wires of its cage.

“Yes,” Kei answers him.

Wide-eyed, they stare directly at the sun. The heat of it lingers on their faces. Looking down, Kei pulls his shirt from his flaring skin. A single hole dots the thin fabric.

“Oh my god,” croons Yamaguchi.

“Unfortunate,” Kei drones.

Yamaguchi pokes the torn pinprick. “Did I get you, too? Your skin?”

“Just the shirt.”

“Sorry. The pieces are sharper than I thought.”

“Told you it was dangerous,” says Kei.

Yamaguchi leans into his laugh, faithful freckles flooding into the tip of his nose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love you guys as much as kei hates everything but yamaguchi.


	8. the record player

Kei’s burn fades but he remembers the exact shape of it, the exact place it lingered on his finger. He swears he still sees its pink aftermath. Yamaguchi tells him it’s only because he knows it was once there, and he’s right. Kei’s other fingers still find the spot in the same way they trace the stretch marks on his hips when he leaves them idle, rubbing and worrying at his pinky like they miss the texture.

Kageyama asks him about it one night, bent over a whiteboard court outline.

“It’s gone. It’s fine.”

“Good,” Kageyama grunts. He bites the cap off the dry erase marker in his hand and speaks around it. “I was thinking about putting him here and him over here _,_ that way we don’t have to rely only on Hinata to receive. That puts you here. I know you don’t like to start in the middle, but deal with it.”

“Whatever,” says Kei.

Kageyama scrunches his face and scratches behind his ear with the marker.

“I don’t know what the hell to do with him.”

Kei points. “Put him here.”

“Why?”

“So he can practice blocking with Hinata and I.”

“Oh. Right.”

As captain, Kageyama is firm but foolhardy, like a Great Dane that can’t possibly meander around without a leash. The marker’s tip squeaks against the whiteboard. Kei observes the shelves that line that club room, cluttered with unzipped bags and spare kneepads. An empty can of Air Solanpas lies haphazardly on its side where someone tossed it before practice. Kei reaches out and straightens it. On the shelf below, a single white shirt sleeve hangs over the zipper track of Yamaguchi’s bag. Kei tucks it inside. Kageyama’s marker squeaks again.

“Should I put him by the line? Or over here by me?” he asks.

“By the line. I kissed Yamaguchi.”

The squeaking stops. The hamster wheel in Kageyama’s head spins swiftly.

“It’s not your business,” Kei says, stare darting away, “but I wanted to say it out loud.”

“You could have just said it in a room by yourself,” offers Kageyama.

“It’s not the same.”

“Fine. Is that it?”

Kei nods. Kageyama nods back. The draft in the room topples the empty spray can.

“Nice,” Kageyama says after a moment.

“Yeah,” Kei agrees.

“Are you going to say more?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Kageyama pokes the board once more. “Where do you think he should go, then?”

________________

   
Kei’s parents reconvene one Thursday in winter.

They stand in his bedroom doorway with their arms around each other in a macabre sort of death grip, the conglomerate of them covered in a flimsy red film as to appear affectionate and ordinary. Turned toward them in his desk chair, Kei attempts to peel it back with his fingernails.

They say they’re going on a trip.

“I’ve always wanted a pair of those wooden shoes!” booms his father.

Kei bites the inside of his cheek, _hard,_ but he doesn’t wake up. He stares at the gaping maw of the dark hallway beyond the doorframe for centuries after his parents go. He waits for them to return and tell him the trip is canceled because his mother buried the credit cards in the backyard or his father shoved the plane tickets into the garbage disposal in a fit of rage. He waits for The Professional to show up at the front door with a pipe bomb—a clandestine lover scorned. He waits for the world to flip on its axis and rocket into the broiling sun. But all Kei gets is a stack of cash on the kitchen counter clipped to an itinerary he won’t read.

“Want me to stay the night? Aren’t you scared there by yourself?” asks Yamaguchi.

“Yes,” says Kei, “and no.”

His house lacks a certain chill with his parents gone. Without them quarantining whichever rooms they fester in, the house’s square footage multiplies exponentially. No longer chained to his bedroom, Kei and Yamaguchi occupy the living room for the first time in years. They know zero of the albums stacked atop Kei’s father’s record player but play them anyway. It croaks at first, sore from disuse until Yamaguchi flips the second record and it sings like it’s meant to, trilling at the two of them and through the empty house, thrilled to be finally liberated.

“If you had a band,” Yamaguchi calls over the music, “what would you name it?”

He rolls across the carpet, closer to Kei so he can hear.

“I don’t know,” Kei answers. “Something vague and pretentious, probably.”

“Me too.”

“Would you like to be in a band?”

“Maybe. It’s a good alternative.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know, like…college, working, mortgages,” Yamaguchi answers, staring into space.

“Being in a band is a lot of work, too.”

“You know what I mean, Tsukki.”

Kei stares down at the album sleeve in his hands. “Yeah. I do.”

He sees Yamaguchi in the wings of the stage before each and every gig, dry heaving his guts into a bottle-ridden trash can from sheer nerves. He sees himself flashing the backstage pass Yamaguchi gave him the previous night to the beefy security guard and nodding his thanks before rushing to hold back Yamaguchi’s greasy hair. As a rockstar, Yamaguchi would have longer hair.

“Would you be in a band, Tsukki?”

“No,” Kei answers.

“No sex? No drugs? No rock and roll?”

“No. No, no.”

Yamaguchi drops his chin in his hand, looks up at him and wonders, “Not even the first one?”

The needle hits the inside of the record. The speakers crackle.

“I don’t know,” Kei replies, batting away the silence.

Yamaguchi sits up and walks to the record player on his knees. He flips the vinyl. The speakers hum. Yamaguchi stretches over the floor by the table and Kei reaches for the next album in the pile by his hip, fingers sliding over a layer of dust.

“Tsukki,” Yamaguchi mutters over the instrumental track, “do you ever feel weird—”

“God, yes.”

“—that we don’t do stuff like teenagers in movies do?”

Kei sweeps the dust onto the carpet. “Like what?”

“Smoke. Drink. Y’know.”

He looks over to find Yamaguchi already staring back, cheek pressed to the floor.

“Do you want to smoke?” Kei wonders.

“No.”

“Do you want to drink?”

“Not really,” Yamaguchi decides.

“Okay. Glad we settled that.”

Yamaguchi hums. He turns from Kei to watch the vaulted ceiling. He thinks about it still but he doesn’t say anything more, just slips his hands under his t-shirt and drums the gentle bass line on his stomach. Kei watches him for another minute, dust on his fingertips, tongue tracing his gums. The record is soft. To it, Yamaguchi falls asleep.

When side A ends, Kei tiptoes around Yamaguchi to flip the disc. Side B murmurs. Kei glances at the stack of albums by the couch but sits where he is instead, staring at the backs of his hands as they rest in his lap. Next to him, Yamaguchi snores. It’s soft and it’s endearing. If his hands weren’t still tucked under his shirt, Kei would stare at them, too. He would study the bumps of his knuckles. His eyes would trace the shape of his nails—wider than Kei’s, just like his palms.

Yamaguchi’s palms are soft, just like his mouth.

Kei listens until the record runs out and the speakers crackle through the living room again. The white noise is soothing, leagues better than silence. His father stopped playing records a decade ago because it gave his mother migraines. Kei turns. Outside the window, snow falls. Falling flakes flicker beneath the back porch light. They spin and plummet and dance and Yamaguchi stirs at his side.

“They won’t call each other by their names,” Kei mumbles, “but they’ll go to fucking Holland together?”

Yamaguchi yawns into his hand. “Maybe they’re working things out.”

“Tadashi,” Kei says helplessly.

“Kei,” Yamaguchi answers, eyes tired.

The needle hits a hidden track and they both flinch. A piano riff cracks the quiet in two.

“No piano,” whines Yamaguchi. “Bedtime.”

“Do you want to sleep in my bed?”

“Yes. Yes, yes. Yes.”

“Okay.”

________________

  
The white noise of his bedroom, steeped in darkness, contrasts wildly to the white noise of the living room. Crackling speakers are traded for soft breathing and the heater’s mechanical hum. It pulls at Kei’s eyelids all the same. Moonlight glints from his glasses on the nightstand. He eyes the pale sliver. Yamaguchi’s breathing fluctuates on the far side of the bed. Kei shifts in his sheets.

He listens past his heartbeat and shuffles backward to find him.

“Uh,” stutters Yamaguchi, “maybe don’t—do that.”

Kei stops. “Do you not want me to?”

“Yeah, I do, I want to sleep next to you, it’s just—”

“So do I.”

“God, _yeah_ , but—”

Kei shifts again, the warmth near Yamaguchi so much more apparent than elsewhere, sheets crinkling between them until Kei finds him and—he sucks a breath between his teeth. Yamaguchi does the same, twitching so hard that he jostles the mattress. Kei bites his lip. Yamaguchi’s hard. Kei turns onto his stomach but he still feels where Yamaguchi pressed into him, into his back, firm and hot through flimsy fabric. Scarlet floods his brain. Kei flushes it out. He presses his cheek to his cool pillow in an attempt to bury the heat that singes his skin, suddenly flaring. 

“Sorry,” Yamaguchi breathes.

Kei burns hotter.

“Don’t be,” Kei tells him.

Something pulls him back, back to Yamaguchi and his labored breathing. But sleep pulls him harder.

________________

  
“Tsukki. Tsukki, hey, wake up.”

When Kei forgets to shut his blinds, bright morning sun leaks into his room relentlessly. It bounces from his white walls and sheets and ricochets off his desk and television. It drips from his ceiling fan and lampshades. It sneaks into the pockets of him and Yamaguchi’s backpacks where they hang on pegs by his bedroom door. So close to Kei’s face, Yamaguchi blocks the light.

“Listen,” he says. “You hear that, right?”

Kei does. Something thumps from the innards of the house. There’s a low, vocal drone. Yamaguchi peels himself from his arm and Kei sits up. He takes his glasses from the nightstand, shakes the rest of the previous night’s moonlight from them and puts them on. He looks back to Yamaguchi. He’s fraught with needless concern. He is always, always fraught with needless concern. Kei’s heart beats for him.

“I hear it.”

“Someone’s downstairs,” he frets. “Did you lock all the doors last night?”

“I did. Wait here.”

“Are you _sure_?”

“Yes. It’s fine,” Kei assures him from the doorway.

He knew his parents wouldn’t make it. The chill of the house returns full force like the entire back wall of the house collapsed, letting snow and biting winter air invade and spider through each staircase and hallway. It nips at the warmth that lingers on Kei’s skin from his bed, from Yamaguchi. He checks the hallway clock—eighteen hours. They made it eighteen hours with one another. The flight takes eleven. Kei checked yesterday afternoon. 

They didn’t even make it on the flight.

“For fuck’s sake,” he groans, stopping short as he enters the living room.

His brother pulls his tongue from the mouth of someone Kei has never seen and squawks, “Oh! Kei!”

Kei eyes the dust stain he made on the carpet last night as she moves from Akiteru’s lap and onto the couch next to him. He’ll pat the stain with a wet paper towel later. It should come right up. Albums Kei hadn’t gone through the previous night yet lie stacked near the base of the couch. Kei tells his brother to be mindful of them.

“I thought you’d be at practice,” Akiteru replies.

“Not until noon.”

“Oh, well. Kei,” he goes on, pointing between Kei and the young woman, “this is Airi. Airi, my little brother, Kei.”

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Airi chirps back.

Her smile is open, easy, her jaw unclenched. Her body is a sort of relaxing wave, fluid like the ocean. Her thin frame melts into the material of the couch. Already, she seems more comfortable next to Akiteru on their couch than Kei has ever felt in his own home or anyone else’s. Can people really be like that?

“Volleyball practice?”

“Yeah,” Kei and Akiteru answer in unison.

“Oh,” Airi replies, nodding, “I’ve never played.”

Kei wants to ask what in the hell they talk about. He turns to his brother.

“Can I talk to you?” he says instead.

Languidly, Akiteru trails him to their father’s office.

“Yikes,” he laughs. “I haven’t been in here in _years_. What’s with the deco?”

“I don’t know. Dad got into the whole coastal thing last spring.”

Akiteru drops himself into the chair behind the enormous oak desk. Kei hasn’t been in the office in a while either. Years, maybe. New books line the shelves. The mixed scent of parchment and dye floats through the room. The sky blue leather squelches when Akiteru rubs hands over the arms of their father’s chair.

“It’s _awful_ ,” he insists, beaming.

“I know. What in the hell are you doing here?”

His beam falls. “What d’you mean? Mom and Dad sent me.”

“For _what?”_

“So you wouldn’t be here alone.”

Kei curls his fingers into his palms. He steadies Akiteru with a glare.

“I don’t need a goddamn babysitter. I’m eighteen.”

“Did I _say_ I was babysitting? They said they didn’t want you to be alone.”

Even from ten thousand kilometers away, his parents crush his solitude in their hands. Kei spins circles, collecting the pieces as they fall. 

“They don’t give a shit about me being alone when they’re here,” he says. “Why now?”

Akiteru stares miserably at him.

“I don’t know, Kei,” he admits, shrugging. “Aren’t you at least happy to see me?”

“Yes. Sorry. I’m just—”

He can’t finish the thought. Akiteru doesn’t make him. Kei takes in a breath and lets it out, but his shoulders stay hunched. Akiteru stands from their father’s ugly armchair and clicks the stapler on the desk. Then he plucks the single silver staple from the desktop and drops it in the bin by the bookshelf, patting Kei’s shoulder as he passes.

“We have to leave midway through the week, anyway. Because of work.”

“Is that your girlfriend?” Kei asks.

“Um. I don’t know, actually. I think we’re just seeing each other.”

“What’s the difference?”

Akiteru pats his shoulder again. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“Fuck off.”

“Can we go back out now? Are you done interrogating me?”

“For now.”

“I knew you wouldn’t be alone, anyway,” Akiteru claims. “I saw Tadashi’s shoes. Is he in your room?”

“Yeah,” Kei answers.

Akiteru’s beam returns, shimmering brightly like the sun off Kei’s white bedroom walls.

“Tell Airi I’ll be down in a minute,” he enthuses. “I gotta go ambush him in all his freckled glory.”

The office sighs as Kei shuts its door in their wake. It will be years before they see it again.


	9. alright, yes, fine

“I’m not going to ask you to cancel.”

“Good.”

“But I would really prefer it if you did.”

Yamaguchi slips his shirt over his head and says, “Tsukki, no.”

“Fine.”

He sidles up to Kei, eyes searching his face. The collar of his shirt tugged his bangs sideways. Kei reaches up and rights them, Yamaguchi’s stare lifting like he tries to look at his forehead and falling again once Kei retracts his arms. Kei pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Heavily, he sighs. The club room is otherwise quiet save the squeak of Kageyama’s dry erase marker. On the landing outside, Hinata enthuses about practice with some of the first-years. His voice rings clear through the door.

“Are you going to pout now?” Yamaguchi implores.

“Only if it helps my cause.”

“It’s cute,” he reassures. He then heaves a sigh. “But— _ugh_ , I—if I bail on her, she might _literally_ kill you in your sleep.” Kei is astonished Tsuru hasn’t already. He tells Yamaguchi this much. Yamaguchi trades his sigh for a clipped laugh. He asks, “You really don’t want to hang out with Akiteru, do you?”

“Akiteru and company,” Kei corrects.

“It won’t be that bad.”

Kei nods. He pulls the towel from around his neck and hooks it over the shelf. 

Akiteru and company insisted on driving them to practice. Kei was dizzy from the swift change; sleeping softly with Yamaguchi in the morning, developing a headache in the car with him, Akiteru and his maybe girlfriend in the afternoon. She and his brother’s hands intertwined atop the middle console. Yamaguchi glanced at them more than once. Kei looked away when Airi winked at him in the rearview mirror. She talked about her roommates between bouts of radio music—which Yamaguchi loves—and Kei pictured the car veering off the road and plunging violently into the Pacific. 

“Me and Hinata are taking the train to some festival,” Kageyama tells him when Kei asks.

Yamaguchi says, “You can always come _with_ Tsuru and me.”

“Your sister’s going?” interjects Kageyama.

“Yeah. Tsukki could come too if he really wanted. Come to think of it, so could Akiteru and Airi. And Hiroji!” he insists, gaining momentum. “We could all go together. We could take up an entire row of seats and get shushed by old people when we whisper over the previews. That could be kind of fun—all of us going together.”

“I’d rather set my clothes on fire while I’m in them,” says Kei.

“Gee, thanks.”

“Not because of you.”

“Well,” replies Yamaguchi, brushing his hand against Kei’s, “if you change your mind, text me.”

________________

  
Pizza drives Kei from his bedroom well after midnight.

The living room television is unnecessarily loud, shouting at him on the staircase. The pizza lies fresh and hot in its open box in the middle of the floor. Akiteru plops a piece on a plate for him. He and Airi sit with their backs to the couch, coke cans stacked between them. Like this, they seem like teenagers. How old did he and Yamaguchi seem last night, stretched over the rug, records from decades past humming through the very same room? Would Akiteru recognize them? Kei plucks the olives off his slice and stands at the mouth of the hallway, pulled into the television by a cinematic explosion of bullets.

“Someone’s going to call the cops,” he mentions.

“If they were gonna do that, they would’ve done it ages ago when this girl maimed this guy with the heel of her shoe,” Airi insists, overjoyed. “He was screaming like, like—like something that screams a lot. Help me out, Aki.”

“A ghost?” Akiteru offers.

“I think that’s more wailing than screaming,” says Kei.

“You should’ve seen it, Kei. The skin of his temple came clean off.”

“He probably deserved it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Airi agrees around the rim of her soda can, “he totally did.”

Kei sits on the floor next to Akiteru, balancing his plate precariously on his knees. The girl on the screen drags her hand across her cheek. She smudges the blood spatter there and crimson streaks her dark face. The film looks recent enough to where it could be corn syrup, but old enough to where it’s not yet CGI.

Akiteru’s phone erupts partway through a grizzly slaughter.

“Want us to pause it?”

“That’s okay.”

He reports a name Kei vaguely recognizes and rushes to their parents’ room. The girl on the television backs herself into a wall. Men in suits creep toward her. Kei’s thumb finds the pad of his pinky. He rubs where his burn once was and doesn’t acknowledge Airi’s peripheral gaze. Groans explode from the television. Kei sets his plate, dotted with black olives, on the floor between them.

“This is the first movie I saw with my first boyfriend,” Airi tells him, something dreamlike in her voice.

“Um,” Kei responds. “Okay.”

“Do you like it? It’s cool, huh?”

“It’s fine.”

He would rather bathe in gasoline than make small talk. He should have stayed in his room. He should have bitten his tongue and went to the movies. Airi stacks his empty plate atop hers and hers atop Akiteru’s. She leans forward and sets the stack near the pizza box, dark blotches of grease staining the cardboard where slices are missing. Light from the television bends over her face as she crawls to Kei’s side. He leans heavily away.

“You’re so pale,” she mentions. Her hair spills over her shoulder. “Paler than me, even.”

“I guess.”

The girl on the television screen zings a throwing star through one of the suited men’s throats. Airi chirps a sudden laugh.

“You’re so not like your brother,” she insists, her voice curling at its edges.

Kei hosts an immediate sense of displacement; a puzzle piece on a monopoly board.

“Yeah. Well. You don’t really know me.”

“Yeah,” Airi agrees, closer again. “That’s kind of fun though, huh?”

Just as she closes the gap, Kei turns. Her lips smack against his cheekbone.

He jerks away, insisting, “I’m eighteen.”

Airi stares at him, waiting for more. His teeth clench.

“And _uninterested_ ,” he snaps, biting the word as if it were meat.

The girl on the screen shoots a man in his chest, point-blank. It spins right out the other side.

________________

  
Kei goes to bed on weekends about the time the Yamaguchi household sprouts and flourishes. But he wakes up early enough to creep past his brother and Airi, stacked like poker chips on the living room couch. Hail batters the windows, knocking to get in. The empty pizza box sits abandoned on the distant counter by the record player. Kei would set it in the recycling bin in the garage if the latch and shuffle wouldn’t awaken them. He leaves through the front door with a brick in his stomach. Yamaguchi will lift it.

“What is this?”

Fumika pulls at her headband. Her paper ears flitter.

“I’m playing cats, _Tsookie_. But be careful, I’m _feral_. It was Tsu-Tsu’s idea.”

“Sounds about right.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tsuru sneers from the couch.

Kei flinches. He hadn’t seen her. She lies flat on the couch, phone pulled to her face.

He deadpans, “I just meant you’re full of good ideas.”

“You’re full of sh—” Tsuru glances at her little sister, “ _shells_.”

“Like the beach?” asks Fumika.

“Like the ocean?” asks Kei.

“Like a shell shop?”

Yamaguchi grins between them where he stands at the mouth of the hallway. Tsuru flings herself from the couch and shoves past him. Yamaguchi spins around and clings to her until she gives up and laughs, if only a little, shoving him off again before retreating to her bedroom. The exchange reminds Kei so much of himself and Akiteru that he has to look away. Years don’t stretch between them. Not a single hour stretches between them.

What stretches between Yamaguchi and Tsuru is Kei.

“What are you thinking about?” 

Yamaguchi stands in front of him, toying with the hairband on his wrist. _Not a lot_ , Kei wants to say because it’s funny.

“Us,” he answers instead. “All of us.”

“Even me?” Fumika wonders at his feet.

“Yes. You, too.” Kei kneels to flick her paper ears. She lunges forward and catches his hand in her mouth, teeth sinking into his knuckle. “Ow, mother of f—”

“Tsukki!”

“— _french fries._ ”

Fumika lets him go and tramples away on all fours. 

Yamaguchi laughs. Kei sits on his knees on the carpet, bleeding all over himself and Yamaguchi laughs. He laughs even as he cradles Kei’s sore hand in his. He laughs all the way across the hall and quiets only when he gets Kei’s hand under the cool stream of water from the kitchen sink.

“Listen,” drones Kei, “your amusement at my pain isn’t charming.”

“Oh god, it’s so funny, Tsukki. She just fucking _bit_ you, who does that?”

“She told me she was feral. It’s my fault.”

Yamaguchi speaks through the tail-end of his laughter, “I have to tell Hana.”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want her to get in trouble.”

They both glance over when hail splats against the windowpane.

“Fine, fine. I won’t tell her, Tsukki.”

“Is she out?” Kei wonders.

Yamaguchi shakes his head. “She’s been hiding in her and Dad’s room all morning. Yesterday, too. I think she’s getting a cold or something.” He turns Kei’s hand under the faucet and says, “I’ll just scold Mika on my own. I have that kind of power, you know.”

Tap water sweeps away light blood. There’s a plate in the sink and the pink water swirls over its white porcelain finish. Kei waits for Yamaguchi to move it but he doesn’t. He just smoothes his thumb over Kei’s knuckle, his hip pressed to Kei’s as they loom together over the deep basin. A glass perches near the drying rack despite the few speckles that reside around its rim. It rests precariously on the edge of the counter. It makes Kei nervous. His tongue traces his molars. He wants to push the glass back. He forgets when Yamaguchi pulls his hand from the faucet and brings it to his face, inspecting. His thumb still soothes.

“It’s not that bad,” he murmurs.

He wears his pajamas, still. Stretched to death from years of use, his tie-dye shirt falls off his shoulder. Splattered there is a colony of freckles, dense and pigmented. If Kei pressed his mouth to them, soft as not to send them scattering, would they taste like anything?

“There’s gold in our bodies,” Kei says, prompting Yamaguchi to face him.

“What?” he wonders.

“Gold,” Kei repeats. “It’s less than a milligram, and it’s in our blood, but it’s there.”

The final dredges of faint pink water swirl around the plate. How much gold had he lost there?

A swift palm at the back of his head brings Kei to Yamaguchi’s mouth. His balance wavers. He grounds himself with a hand on Yamaguchi’s shoulder, skin and freckles glowing warm. Yamaguchi lurches into him and Kei gathers that he hadn’t planned to kiss him until just before he did, maybe _after_ he did and now that he has, Yamaguchi buzzes a pleased hum against him. Cool water seeps into the inch of tie-dye fabric Kei caught beneath his hand. Yamaguchi hooks his arm around the back of Kei’s neck, keeping him close. His mouth was parted when Yamaguchi pulled him in—their lips slide quick and warm because of it. Kei’s hand slips down his arm. It further tugs the loose fabric of his shirt, skin firm and hot beneath his palm as it slides and it’s incidental but embers crackle in Kei’s stomach anyway, kindled and rekindled one thousand times in a sole second.

Kei leans into him and Yamaguchi twitches, his hip sending the precarious glass to the floor.

Shards skate across the tacky blue tile. Yamaguchi pulls back, groans, kisses Kei twice more quickly and unwinds from him completely. Kei’s dizzied, disoriented from the swift change in proximity. He should have pushed the glass back like he wanted to. He should have set it in the sink with the plate.

“When you think back on that,” suggests Yamaguchi, collecting clear pieces on a paper towel, “just filter this part out.”

________________

  
There is no reason for Shimada Mart to be open until ten at night, but it is. Kei works on assignments Yamaguchi has already finished at the library until it closes and spends the next hour walking circles around the fountain out front. His breath floats between his face and his phone and he seeks out songs laced with piano. Kei doesn’t want to learn but rather simply wishes he knew how; wishes to wake up one day and suddenly be able to pull music from grand keyed contrivances.

He circles Shimada Mart, too. He wants to see Yamaguchi but his migraine won’t tolerate the fluorescents, the odious green tile, the drone of the shop’s electric open sign in the front window. He glances at him through the glass. What if this were the first time he saw him? What if he came in for a cheap glasses repair kit and poorly-packaged snacks? Yamaguchi would grin at him, ring him up, send him on his way. But what else?

“I would write my cell phone number on your receipt,” Yamaguchi replies when Kei asks.

“You would not. You aren’t that brave.”

Yamaguchi hums and stuffs his apron into his backpack.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “You’re intimidating.”

“You mean if you didn’t know me.”

“Yeah. Right. Until one sees you with a one hundred and four-degree fever crafting tin foil hats to ward off ceiling aliens.”

Kei huffs, “Don’t mention that in public _._ ”

“It’s just us out here, Tsukki.”

He pulls the zipper of his jacket to the top of its track. “Still.”

Yamaguchi slings his scarf around his neck and grins into the knitted fabric. Kei glances over at him in the two feet of darkness between the widespread glow of streetlights, looming tall and bright over the road. Icicles hang from the necks of some. Their points glitter dangerously.

“You didn’t text me back last night,” Yamaguchi mentions. “Was it fun?”

The tail of Kei’s migraine whips his brain against the back of his skull.

“No,” he answers. He chews his lip.

“You want a mint?”

He releases it. “Thanks.”

Yamaguchi presses one into his palm and asks, “Why wasn’t it fun?”

Kei sat in the center of his bed, leaden. If he moved, he would have cracked the wooden frame beneath. He stared hard at the stark white pane of his duvet and plucked feather after feather after feather from the fabric. He pressed down on his bubbling guilt and roiling shame until they dissipated enough that he fell asleep right in the middle of his mattress, glasses pushed up into his hair.

“Just wasn’t.”

“Sorry, Tsukki. That girl seemed cool.”

“No,” Kei argues, brows pulling together. “She kissed me.”

“ _Huh_?” grunts Yamaguchi. He pulls at Kei’s sleeve to make him stop. “Isn’t she dating your brother?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“What’d you _do_?”

“Oh,” Kei says, “I reciprocated. She’s carrying my child.”

Yamaguchi scowls. “That isn’t funny.”

“That fact that you don’t think it’s funny is what makes it funny.” Kei blinks at the freckles on the upturned point of Yamaguchi’s nose. It’s pink from the cold. He needs to wear a hat. Kei zooms his focus out in time to watch Yamaguchi roll his eyes. He says, “Yamaguchi, what do you think I did? I deflected.”

“It’s a kiss, Kei, not a bullet.”

“You can’t deflect a bullet.”

“What’d you say?” questions Yamaguchi. He scrapes the asphalt with his shoe.

“Not interested,” Kei reports.

“Are—are you going to tell Akiteru?”

Instead of alleviating the brick in Kei’s stomach, Yamaguchi sits on it.

“I don’t know,” Kei breathes.

Yamaguchi snaps his head up and orders, “You _have_ to. That’s—it’s awful. I mean, if someone did that to me—they were with me, kissing me and when I turned around, tried to do the same with Tsuru, with my sister, like—that’s—I can’t—I can barely think of something worse. That’s—that’s _fucked._ ” His stare, heavy with apprehension, drops between his feet. Kei’s heart beats at the very front of his chest like it reaches for him.

“That will never happen to you,” he tells him firmly.

Lost in thought, Yamaguchi walks on. Kei follows. He presses the dissolving mint to the roof of his mouth. He longs suddenly to touch him, hold his face and pet his fingers but every touch is too trite so Kei stays where he is and watches their clouded breaths puff in the evening air.

“Did you tell him about the toothpick house?” Yamaguchi asks the asphalt.

“No.”

“About The Professional?”

“No.”

“Tsukki…” he mumbles.

His disappointment stings. Kei bristles.

“What?” he asserts. “I told _you_ about those things.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Do you tell Tsuru everything you tell me?”

“No,” Yamaguchi answers, looking back at him.

“Okay.”

Yamaguchi falls back to walk at Kei’s side again. Kei digs bits of mint from his molars because he’d bitten it out of habit. They glance at each other at the same time and the coincidence of it keeps them staring. Yamaguchi’s eyelashes are spidery. It’s hard to tell from his vantage point but Kei knows. Because Kei stares, Yamaguchi flushes.

“You should tell him about Airi,” he says, blooming red.

“I know,” Kei admits.

Yamaguchi nods brusquely. He pulls the end of his scarf back over his shoulder when it falls.

“So,” he asks, “where?”

“Where what?”

“Where’d she kiss you? I wanna know.”

“I turned when she leaned in,” Kei says. “So on my cheek.”

“Like where?” Yamaguchi presses.

“I said my cheek.”

“Yeah but, like, where exactly, Tsukki? Point to it.”

Kei does. Bouncing on his tiptoes, Yamaguchi rushes to plant a peck on his cheekbone.

“Mine now!” he chirps in Kei’s ear. “My spot now! I overruled her!”

“Oh my god.”

“Mine! My spot now!”

“Alright, yes, fine,” Kei affirms.

The brick in his stomach cracks to pieces. Steps light, he walks Yamaguchi home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please imagine all these doofs at the movies together, oh my god. i'm not sure who would be more fed up--tsuru or kei.
> 
> <3


	10. lost in me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when i am sad, oh god, i'm sad,  
> but when i'm happy, i am happy  
> and there's just no place in between for us to meet.
> 
> \- flashlight / the front bottoms

Akiteru is short with him when he leaves. Kei understands; he spent the majority of the time his brother was home at practice or with Yamaguchi or in his room wishing to exist elsewhere. Kei will call Akiteru in a few days to tell him why. He doesn’t want him to stay close to Airi any longer, but he wants to cast himself in the middle of such confrontations even less.

Kei is used to confrontations between his parents. He’s used to confrontations between Akiteru and his parents and even between himself and Yamaguchi. But Kei doesn’t clash with his brother. Together, they are simply too fragile; limp petals atop the jagged, bleeding stem that is their parents.

His parents used to buy flowers. They littered the house in vases and pitchers and his mother sent Kei and Akiteru around to collect the vessels once the flowers wilted, sad and fainted over glass rims. They brought them to her and she filled them one at a time. Pour, fill, mix, cut, and garnish. It would have been quicker to fulfill each step to all the vases at once. She fluffed green leaves and separated sticky petals and Kei sat on his knees at the high counter and calculated how much quicker it all would get done if she carried out the task in a way that made more sense to him. Nothing she did ever made sense to him.

Kei can’t pin his parents down with thumbtacks.

Does Yamaguchi see his mother and father when he looks in the mirror? Bits and pieces of Hana, too? Or does he see only himself like Kei? Kei’s eyes are his mother’s. His nose and chin are his father’s. He sees the strings or rather, he knows they’re there. The strings that connect him and his parents are slack, dotted, trembling from Kei’s fervent attempts to separate them once and for all while he simultaneously grips them tight, knuckles white and aching, for paralyzing fear of spinning completely away once they detach and vanishing into the ether with a violent spark. If Kei fails to let them go, will they overlap?

Will his parents’ behaviors bleed into his as time progresses? What about Yamaguchi? Will Kei one day snap and start throwing things at him, start screaming, start drowning his possessions in the lap pool and initiating affairs with realtors? Will he chart the mileage on his car?

Will they deteriorate all at once? Or as gradually as they assembled?

________________

  
The garage door cranks open at three in the morning. Kei thought he had another day. He completes the lower lefthand box the moment his parents come in and the house freezes over. The windows ice up. The living room goes numb. Even the couch cushions beneath Kei develop a layer of frost, adhering him to the leather.

He pulls his headphones around his neck but his parents are silent. Silent, but whole—Kei feared his father would snap and they’d return, him in his wooden shoes and his mother in tiny, raw pieces, stuffed like a blood sausage into her own luggage. Wordlessly, they march to opposite ends of the house. His father tosses Kei a glance as he passes through the living room. Two doors bang shut. There’s a clattering from his parents’ bedroom; his mother tosses something fragile to the floor. One of them will step on the pieces later. Kei leers at the numbers on his sudoku until they cling to his eyelids when he blinks. His glasses press into his face, suddenly dense and burdensome. He sets his pencil in the crack of the puzzle book and pulls them off. Numbers dissolve.

Down the hall, the guest room door slams again. Kei replaces his glasses when his father rushes in. Fist clenched around his keys, his eyes dart around the room. His father’s stare has a way of flattening Kei to the nearest surface, minimizing him until he rivals the smallest spec on marble or the faintest warp in wood.

“Did you play my records?”

“Yes,” Kei tells him after a moment.

His voice is hoarse from disuse. He withstands the urge to clear his throat.

“How’d they sound?”

“Great,” he breathes.

Curtly, his father nods. He turns and leaves through the front door without his jacket. Kei remains on the couch for another minute, allowing whatever bit of winter his father let in to sink into his skin. He closes his book and its thin pages bend around the tucked pencil. Within the house whirls a cool, thick humidity. Something anticipatory and bleak. It churns through each room, dense like mercury. Is it thicker in the guest room? Or is it thickest in his parents’ room, ballooning until all the windows shatter outward?

Alone on the couch, Kei awaits combustion until twilight melts into dawn.

His father returns with the sun. Kei waits until he shuts himself in the guest room to leave the same way his father had, through the front door of the house before the crackling pre-storm static pulls his hair up on its ends. Uproar licks at the insides of his head. His bloated brain leaks from his ears. It trickles beneath the collar of his jacket and sticks to starchy fabric, frosted by morning air.

Kei pockets the birdbath key after he uses it. It glows between layers of cool denim.

The inside of Yamaguchi’s house bathes in pale orange. All its walls and counters and surfaces welcome the sherbet sunrise, soaking in its warmth only to radiate it back at Kei as he pads over carpet and hardwood. Where his house locks out sleep like a thief, Yamaguchi’s beckons it. There’s magic in the fact that even a house that holds so many people carves out spells to fall static. Kei praises the stillness. If he focuses, maybe he can commandeer the silence and bring it home. But he won’t take it from Yamaguchi—asleep atop his blankets, brown hair spilled over his pillow, curled into himself at the edge of his bed like he knew Kei would come to lie beside him.

Kei draws nearer until he feels Yamaguchi’s soft breath on his skin. Yamaguchi’s eyelids flutter open, batting spidery lashes. His lips part. He will ask if Kei is alright and Kei _isn’t_ —he’s lost and swirling and exhausted and overwhelmed and underwhelmed and desperate and stubborn and bored, bleeding, stumbling in the dark, tripping over things he’s dropped and things he hasn’t dropped yet but things that hang precariously from his fingers and split his nails in two, the same way his teeth split his lips—but it isn’t important now, all that isn’t important, and Yamaguchi is.

Kei pushes all the softness, the silk and the warmth he gets from Yamaguchi into his kiss.

Caught off guard, Yamaguchi draws in a quiet gasp. Kei presses closer, stealing that breath too and parts his mouth again to kiss him with all intent. Against his mouth, Yamaguchi melts. He’s languid from sleep and so soft, matching Kei as their lips click and kiss. The ease of kissing Yamaguchi, of drawing him delicately from sleep slips pleasantly over his skin. He holds Yamaguchi’s face in his hands, pinkies propped beneath his jawbone. Blindly, Yamaguchi pushes Kei’s glasses into his hair. Kei’s thumbs twitch on his cheeks; Yamaguchi’s mouth parts, wetting his lips, his soft pink tongue wanting Kei’s. Their noses bump once, twice. Kei hesitates, relaxes his jaw and parts his mouth into his kiss. He nudges Yamaguchi’s tongue with his, supple and warm, nudging gently.

Softly, Yamaguchi whines. He pushes the sound into Kei’s mouth on a sharp exhale and, swallowing it, Kei shivers. He presses his fingertips into Yamaguchi’s face to steady his tremble. The insistence quickens Yamaguchi’s breath. Sleep releases its tired grip on his body and like Kei has pressed his power button, Yamaguchi moves—he leans and arches as Kei kisses him, hands balling into the front of his jacket to tug him close. The bed shifts. Sighing, Kei nudges their tongues together again. Yamaguchi sighs in return and Kei tips his chin and licks slowly into his mouth, sliding through the wet warmth of the inside of him. He tastes the smooth, slick velvet beneath Yamaguchi’s tongue. Kei forgets to steady his hands; Yamaguchi holds Kei’s shaking fingers against his cheek and entwines them with his own.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei sighs, his name dripping hotly from his tongue.

Yamaguchi nods ardently against him, still kissing, still connected and for the first time, Kei believes himself beneficial, right, _good_ , okay; worth all the space he occupies between Yamaguchi’s lungs and in his hands, behind his teeth and atop the blankets on his bed.

Yamaguchi’s face burns the pad of Kei’s thumb as he rubs it back and forth, back and forth over his cheek. Yamaguchi’s body jerks. Their knees bump. Kei tilts his head the opposite way, cheekbone pressing into Yamaguchi’s pillow and with the novel angle, kisses him deeper, slower. He laps softly at the underside of Yamaguchi’s tongue. Spit slides warm between pink muscles. Yamaguchi’s mouth is so slick, so wet for him that drool drips from the corner of his lips and over his red cheek. Kei’s thumb slips easily through it. Yamaguchi jerks, bumping him again. Yamaguchi shifts his leg with a sudden hand curled over the back of his knee and slips his thigh in between Kei’s. He licks Kei’s name into his mouth—firm and fervent like a promise.

Instantly, Kei overheats. A hot fist clenches in his stomach and, searing, he pulls away.

Yamaguchi’s leg drops from between his thighs when he turns onto his back. He keeps Kei’s hand on the side of his face, however, his palm damp and heavy. Kei rests the tip of his tongue on his incisors. His mouth thrums with satisfaction—with use. They pant arduously into the still air of Yamaguchi’s bedroom like it’s their first fucking time breathing, wild hearts caught between gasping, clutching lungs. The room glows warm, inflicted by the radiating flush on tan and pale skin.

________________

  
No one makes dinner.

Kei wants to be grateful for the pass on stilted conversation and overt, seething contempt but instead, he overflows like water from a gutter, drip-dropping everywhere without a rut through which to run. He dumps rice noodles in a pot and steams assorted vegetables. He wipes down the cutting board and strains boiling water into the sink, alone in the too-bright kitchen. The butcher knife in his hand shines like a gem. He sticks it to the knife board on the wall and it clinks, metal to metal. 

He taps at his mother’s door with his knuckle but that’s how his father knocks, so instead Kei drops his arm and calls through the wood.

“Mom?”

A moment crawls by. The plates in Kei’s hands acquire weight.

“What?” she calls back. “Kei?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

“Can I come in?”

“Okay.”

He holds one plate in the crook of his arm and pushes open the door.

He never goes in his parents' bedroom. It’s the phantom limb attached to the decomposing body that is their house. Kei feels it, but is it actually here? He bathed the dog they had for a week when he was seven in his parents round porcelain bathtub. It is the single clearest memory he possesses of the room, and he can’t decide at eighteen if he dreamt it or not. 

Even the air is different in the room; musty and thick like basement air. The dust must have lifted from the plethora of books laid out on the bed, their spines cracked and pages spread. Old art books litter every inch of the bed save the handful of space his mother occupies.

“Christ,” says Kei.

“You look like a server,” his mother informs, her grin weak, “carrying plates like that.”

Kei takes the plate from the crook of his arm.

“Have you eaten?”

She hasn’t. She closes an oversized book, its wrinkled pages crunching, but Kei doesn’t take its place. Opting to stand, he hands over her plate. She thanks him. She eats the vegetables first while Kei eats the noodles and ignores the detached hotel feel of the room. If he listens hard enough, he hears the ting of the bell at the front desk. Another book crunches as his mother closes it. An army of text and photographs glares up at him—sculptures and paintings and pottery and prints.

“What are you doing?” he implores her.

“I’m looking for inspiration. It’s difficult for me right now.”

Kei wants to ask about the art in Holland. He wants to ask about the architecture. But unease needles its way into his head and convinces him to neglect what he wants and maybe to forget his parents ever went, to forget the grease on the bottom of the pizza box and the way his father’s records sounded.

He points to the book nearest him and says, “This one is neat.”

“Yes,” his mother agrees immediately like she’d been surveying it the instant before he came in. She motions to the tinted photograph with an outstretched pinky. “It’s bronze, this sculpture. And it’s just twenty-four centimeters tall.”

“Really?”

She replies, “The way the photo is taken completely skews the truth, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Kei answers.

His mother nods. She turns over the page, half-empty plate resting on her knees.

“Why don’t they photograph it next to something? For size reference?” Kei wonders.

“Why do you think they don’t?” his mother wonders in turn.

“Because it doesn’t matter.”

“If it didn’t matter,” she says, “the artist would have made it bigger.”

Kei refuses the idea that each choice made by an artist is inherently artistic. Intimidated, he lifts his gaze.

There are more books in the fireplace—his father’s things. His parents don’t use the fireplace, even in winter. It has become an inconvenient shelf. Coals still line the hearth, laid out beneath the bottommost book, gray ash encrusting glossy book jackets. His father should move them to the library. They’re far too vulnerable here. Kei sees his mother tossing a match to the dry, leafy pages, smells the black smoke puffing from the chamber, imagines the fiery bits of text and diagram sparkling up the flue.

“Have you seen your father?”

“Not today.”

His mother stiffens as if she’s been yanked by a string. Just as swiftly, she deflates.

Kei turns his head and stares at the mantel. The photographs in frames are old. Former friends and events are sealed away within them, encased in glass and plastic and dust. Between the photographs rests a cup of clay. A goblet, almost. Its thick stem is lopsided, leaning painfully to the side. The cup is blue and yellow and splashed with green where the two glaze colors mingled in the process. Lumps and scratches from tottery hands spot its surface.

Kei made it for his parents when he was nine. His brother put it in the kiln for him because he wasn’t old enough to use it. Kei still doesn’t feel old enough to use it. Kei will never feel old enough to use it. Did he scrape together the bauble for their anniversary? Was it someone’s birthday? 

Did Kei have any reason at all? 

In his parents’ bedroom, shelves sport holes. There are gaps between objects where things have decidedly gone missing—vases, frames, memorabilia, trinkets and treasures, all snatched by hostile hands. Kei catches the inside of his cheek between his teeth. His stare flits to his mother. She reads tiny blurbs of text beside photographs of paintings and sculptures, her face peaceful and fresh, surrounded by armfuls of inspiration she can’t find.

Guilt drops like an anvil. It cracks Kei’s spine to pieces and sends his broken body to the floor. He claws at the carpet and pleads. He reveals the toothpick house. He mentions The Professional. He tells his mother he’s sorry and cries, and cries, and cries. Staring down at him, eyes wild, she repulses forgiveness.

Guilt drains like a cut. Kei stares down at the half-empty plate in his hand as he stands whole and upright near the bedroom door. Old books creak and flap as his mother searches on. Kei fills his lungs with hotel air and expels it with patience. He glances back at the pitiful clay cup on the mantel.

Of all the fragile things his mother has demolished in this room, it was never one of them.

________________

  
“I’m sorry,” says Kei. And again, “I’m sorry.”

“For what? You didn’t _do_ anything.”

Kei tugs at his hair, folded into himself in his desk chair. His phone balances on his knees.

“If I don’t say that, then I don’t know what else to say.”

“Man, this—I really liked her, Kei.”

“Past tense.”

“ _Yes_ , past tense,” Akiteru sighs. “I can’t believe it. I mean, I _do_ , but.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop saying that. Are you Tadashi?”

Kei rolls his eyes. Like he’s been summoned, a text from Yamaguchi rushes to his phone. Kei turns it over and listens to the speakerphone crackle as Akiteru sighs again, this time with irritation. Kei pictures him in his apartment with his elbow on the kitchen counter, pressing the heel of his palm into his forehead. He still wears his office clothes because he hadn’t changed before Kei called.

“Did—did you tell Tadashi?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to my ego.”

“Yes,” Kei answers, “I told him.”

“What did he say?” 

“That’s she’s a piece of shit. Because she is a piece of shit.”

“I know,” Akiteru snaps, voice muffled like he speaks around his thumbnail. “I know that now.”

Kei pinches a loose thread from the hole in his jeans and rolls it between his thumb and forefinger. Kei never knows how to treat betrayal: the belief his brother loses in Airi and in himself, Tsuru’s pulling of pins on things whispered in confidence to toss like grenades at Yamaguchi, the eventual aired disloyalty of the toothpick house inflicted upon Kei’s mother by her husband. When will it be Kei’s turn?

“Akiteru. Sorry that you liked her,” Kei mumbles.

Akiteru takes a long, deep breath.

“No,” he replies sternly. “Kei, I’m sorry you were put in that position—with Airi, you know. It wasn’t fair, and I’m _pissed,_ Kei, and next time I’m going to come alone.” He takes another breath. “Next time, I’ll come home, just me. We’ll duck Mom and Dad. It’ll just be me.”

Kei’s chin grazes over denim as he nods. “Good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah,” he promises. “Good.”

________________

  
On evenings when quiet swallows Yamaguchi’s house, even the floorboards refuse to creak like they’ll toss the balance and propel the structure into the stratosphere, jettisoning shingles and furniture as it flies. Looseleaf pages crinkle as Kei flips through his notebook. The living room television whispers.

“Kei?” says Yamaguchi.

Kei looks over. “What?”

“Will you lie on top of me?”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because the blanket’s all the way across the room.”

“ _I’m_ all the way across the room.”

“Yeah, but, like…you have legs.”

“Give it time and your blanket will have legs too.”

Yamaguchi shudders. “Creepy.”

“Yeah. Science is weird.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a doodle in the top corner of Kei’s math notes. Yamaguchi drew his own head, face spotted generously with purple freckles. The sketched thought bubble beside it contains the McDonald’s arches.

“Are you coming?”

Kei slides his notebook into his bag. He goes and stands over Yamaguchi on the couch.

“I promise I won’t get fresh with you,” Yamaguchi tells him.

“ _Fresh_?”

“Yeah, you know.”

“I don’t know.”

“ _Tsukki,_ ” he whines.

He clams up when Kei props his knees astride him. Audibly, Yamaguchi swallows.

“I’m bigger than you,” Kei mentions, and Yamaguchi swallows again. “This isn’t going to be comfortable.”

“For you.”

“For _you._ ”

Kei’s wrong. Once he takes his glasses off, it is comfortable. He isn’t sure if Yamaguchi concurs but he hasn’t complained thus far as Kei settles on top of him, their chests glued together and his face smashed into the couch cushion above Yamaguchi’s shoulder. Pleased, Yamaguchi hums. It thrums in Kei’s skin.

He thought it would be less intimate but Yamaguchi’s chest rises beneath him, in sync with his, and his palms heat up his shoulder blades. His fingers stroke their sharp protrusions. Yamaguchi breathes shortly, unevenly. Kei melts into him like butter on a griddle. He spills warmly into the valleys of him: the dip in his throat, his inward curve of his stomach, the stretch of skin between his hipbones. Static clings to his shirt sleeve as Kei slides his arm over the couch. His hand finds Yamaguchi’s hair and he exhales, fingering soft brown strands. Yamaguchi’s fingertips lower to press into the middle of his back.

“This is hard,” he admits. “I really wanna get fresh with you, Tsukki.”

“Quit saying that. I don’t even know what it means.”

“You can infer, though.”

Kei pins his tongue between his canines. Suddenly skittish, he wishes to slip between the couch cushions, fall into the tear in the fabric beneath and trap himself inside its wooden skeleton so Yamaguchi has to turn the couch over on its back to fish him out like the time the very same thing happened with the television remote.

“Yamaguchi,” he starts.

“Mm?” Yamaguchi hums.

“Remember when we went to sleep after we listened to those old records?” Kei recalls quietly. “And I backed into you.”

Yamaguchi tenses.

“Yes,” he breathes.

“And when we were kissing the other morning. You moved my—your leg. Between mine.”

Yamaguchi squirms a little. “Mhm.”

“With that,” Kei mumbles, “I mean, with things like that—don’t rush. Could we—could you go slow with me?”

A moment passes. But it crawls over hours, weeks, months in Kei’s head. Kei gasps when Yamaguchi squeezes him tight around his middle. In his ear, Yamaguchi’s laugh is breathy, almost goddamn _giddy_ , and the rush of air sends goosebumps over Kei’s arms.

“Yeah, sure,” Yamaguchi assures him. “Whatever you want.”

Sighing, Kei spills again into his every dip and valley. Why had he doubted him?

“You want to wait until marriage, Tsukki?” he teases.

“I didn’t say that.”

The lack of space between them rattles Kei’s head. He wants to be used to it already; wants to expect it, worship it, and deem it commonplace; wants to outstretch his unsteady hands in his direction, brimming with the things Yamaguchi wants from him. But the newfangled intimacy pries at doors Kei keeps shut, terrified Yamaguchi will swing them open and find nothing inside.

Yamaguchi lies in a five-point star in the center of the room. Kei curls beneath the nearest flat surface in anticipation of the hurricane.

The television continues to whisper. Kei lifts himself onto his elbow. Yamaguchi is too close and attentive to kiss on the mouth. Reading him, Yamaguchi presses their cheeks together, his hair poking at Kei’s nose. Their mutual flush mingles and sizzles where they touch. They spark and flare and melt until they lie like puddles on the couch.

“Geez, everyone will be home soon. Get a room.”

They ripple.

“We did,” counters Yamaguchi. “It’s the living room.”

“That was lame, Tadashi.”

“You put me on the spot. I couldn’t think of anything better.”

“We like an audience,” suggests Kei.

Yamaguchi barks a laugh. “There we go—pretend I said that one, Tsuru.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Her irritated sigh carries down the hallway as she goes. Kei shifts his shoulders and her residual glare slides off his back. Yamaguchi presses their cheeks together again. Despite the quips, they both flush hot at the intrusion.

“You know,” mentions Yamaguchi, “you guys are a lot alike.”

“Please do not.”

“Do you ever think I’m like Akiteru?”

“I prefer not to think about that while we’re like this.”

Yamaguchi hums. He traces the shell of Kei’s ear with his fingertip. Kei shuts his eyes.

Yamaguchi is the only one who stays shiny. Akiteru shone once but gave it up. Akiteru is matte but Yamaguchi shines, beautiful yet unpolished, his finish nicked and scarred by Kei’s prickly proximity. Yamaguchi sands down his edges the best he can but there things about Kei, dense and jagged things, that even Yamaguchi can’t flatten. Instead, he brushes against them and glows pink as Kei patches him up.


	11. IOU

To organize, Kei slides items into place and plucks out others. Yamaguchi simply dumps everything out and starts anew. He tosses the vinyl carcass of his volleyball bag on Kei’s desk chair and grabs a roll of athletic tape as it tries to escape. Two empty water bottles spin beneath the bed and a dozen candy wrappers unfurl on the carpet.

Arbitrarily, Yamaguchi wonders, “What have your parents said to you about college?”

Kei watches him collect bottle caps in his hand and answers, “Not a word.”

“Have you said anything to them?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” says Yamaguchi, shrugging, “like, where you wanted to go—close, far, you know—that sort of thing. Any sort of thing.”

Pressure fizzes in Kei’s stomach. If Yamaguchi shook him, he’d burst like a can of soda pop.

“No.”

“Have you thought about what—”

“No, Yamaguchi.”

Yamaguchi swallows his question.

“Okay,” he says instead.

Kei presses his palm to his forehead and twists until it hurts. Hollow plastic crinkles as Yamaguchi gathers bottles, crowding them together by his knee. He will forget they’re there and topple them all in a matter of minutes. They’ll fall with hollow thunks. Kei hears them already. His hand falls into his lap and he stares at the bend of his knuckles, white even against the starkness of his bed sheets.

“My parents want me to stay close,” Yamaguchi mentions. He adds another bottle to the group and glances at Kei, his stare sticking when he finds him looking back. Color rises on his face as he continues, “The more they say that, the more I think they want me around here for their own reasons. Like watching my brothers and Fumika, or so they don’t have to worry about me as much as they would if I went far away.”

Kei blinks. “You want to go far away?”

Yamaguchi blinks back. “I don’t know, it depends—what do you—I mean, maybe.”

Kei pulls at a loose thread on his jeans, then reroutes to pluck a feather from his duvet.

“You should do what you want,” he says. “Not what they want you to.”

“I know,” Yamaguchi replies helplessly. “It’s just—it’s hard to read them anymore. Hana is being weird. Maybe it’s because Tsuru and I are so close to leaving. Or not leaving, or whatever. Dad’s all quiet. Tsukki, I love my family, but sometimes I wish I could jet into space and shake off their influence.”

He stares hard at the floor. He flips a bottle cap between his fingers. Kei nods, his heart ballooning in his chest for Yamaguchi and aching where it mashes against his ribcage. It’s moments like this where Kei is grateful he can touch him, can stare at him without apprehension but, simultaneously and in moments like these, Kei freezes. His hands wrap tight around his own leash and heave backward with all their might.

How much of Yamaguchi is influenced by his family? Would he change if he were to find himself kilometers away, protruding cities and streams between them? Would his consistently frayed nerves stitch together? Would they split further, torn by sudden distance and uncertainty? If he were to leave them, would Kei be enough for him?

“Me too,” Kei murmurs. “You haven’t told me this before.”

Yamaguchi stares up at him from the floor, pressing the base of a water bottle against his temple.

“Because it’s like someone standing in a puddle explaining how drowning feels to a guy stranded in the middle of the ocean.”

“Nice one.”

“Thanks. But I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

Yamaguchi turns. He stacks rolls of athletic tape atop each other to build a tower.

“Why do you have so many?” Kei asks him. “You don’t use it.”

“Yeah. But you and Hinata do.”

When he runs out of supplies, Yamaguchi shifts to search for more. His knee knocks into the hoard of empty bottles and they tip and thunk on the carpet like noisy dominoes. He swears and erects them all again, one by one, their rims pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Yamaguchi turns his attention to the candy wrappers. They crunch as he gathers the dozen of them in his palm.

“You sure you’ve gotten them all?” Kei teases.

“Don’t laugh,” replies Yamaguchi. “They’re _your_ wrappers.”

________________

  
Kei and Yamaguchi shrug into their jackets by the front door. Snow cascades past the front window and the chill reaches through the thick glass, yanking them outside. The tight leather of the living room recliner squeaks and groans.

“Are you going, Tadashi? Let me drive you.”

Kei eyes his father. “What?”

“It’s cold,” he reasons. “So I’ll drive him.”

“I was going to walk him home.”

In his pocket, Kei’s fingers curl into his palm. He planned to hold Yamaguchi’s hand.

He says, “You haven’t driven him home since we were fourteen.”

“Damn it, Kei. I’m trying to help.”

“Fine,” he growls.

Kei goes, too. Extended interactions between his father and Yamaguchi make him uneasy, like three minutes alone with the man will alter Yamaguchi’s perception and he’ll suddenly favor Kei’s father instead of him, discrediting every argument Kei has ever presented against him. His head aches as the car trudges through snowy streets. Yamaguchi works in the morning. He mentions this and Kei’s father tosses him an approving look in the rearview mirror.

“You have an impressive sense of responsibility,” he tells him.

“He does it for the discount.”

“Tsukki’s lying. I only _mostly_ do it for the discount.”

“Regardless,” he interjects, “it shows great ambition.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Your mother must be proud.”

“Stepmother,” Kei corrects.

“Yes. She must be proud, Tadashi.”

Yamaguchi nods his thanks, his stare sliding out the window. Kei grinds his teeth. He wants to relay Yamaguchi’s given name with the ease of a parent or a guardian—with the ease of a lover. He wants not to strip Yamaguchi of the name he’s come to know as his for years now but rather supplement it, scrawling his given name in thick black ink on his door, on his desk, and on his wrist to remind himself. Yamaguchi stares at him in the side mirror. Ice sticks in the crevices between glass and metal and snow crunches under tires as the car slides into Yamaguchi's driveway.

“If you think I should work,” Kei says once he’s gone, “just say so.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Then what the fuck was that?”

“Jesus,” breathes his father. “It was just a conversation. You sound like your mother. If you feel you should get a job, that’s your business. You’re an adult.”

Kei glowers at the dashboard. That same soda fizz builds in his gut as snow urges the car to crawl back home, kilometers of white stretching before it. The glow of headlights skims over the glistening road. It would have taken them forever if he and Yamaguchi walked. A winter chill seeps into the car and Kei freezes, tucked into the passenger seat with the heat blasting. Yamaguchi is probably asleep in his bed already. Kei checks his phone in vain.

At a stop sign, his father clicks up the heat. A minute later, he drops it back down again.

“Your mother took up ceramics when she was your age,” he mentions. “Changed schools and her entire path.”

Kei glances at him. His father’s eyes stick fast to the road. Kei has forever known his mother as an artist; it’s impossible to imagine her differently. He associates her with glaze and with putty, brushed this color and that until the spectrum bleeds together. He associates her with chalky imprints of clay dust on the shoulders of his shirts and the material of the living room furniture. No, she was always an artist—even before she knew so. But what tipped her off?

Will Kei follow her lead? Will he attain a sudden yearning to sculpt and paint, compounding clay and arching brushes across white pages? Will Yamaguchi wake up one day with a distinct urge to master photography, fingers tilting lenses and shaking inky polaroids? His father only went into construction after his mother died, but what about before? Will Kei and Yamaguchi abandon volleyball altogether, yanking their routines apart and snapping them into place heading two different directions?

“Why are you telling me this?” Kei implores.

His father taps his meaty fingers on the wheel. He shifts in the driver’s seat.

“Things change, always,” he answers. “I want you to be prepared for that.”

Moments pass. Unease lies mask-like on his face and Kei has to look past it to truly see it, the same way he has to unfocus his gaze at the pale expanse of sky to see the skittering rain when it first begins to fall.

He wonders, “What exactly will you change that I’m not already aware of?”

His father’s lack of a response drops Kei’s stomach into his shoes. He kills the engine in the driveway. The garage door rises but he makes no move to bring the car in from the whipping onslaught of snow and it tick, tick, ticks on the snow-covered cement.

“Did you tell Akiteru about the toothpick house?” Kei asks.

“No.”

“Did you tell him about The Professional?”

His father stares quizzically at the radio. “Who?”

“The realtor.”

“What on earth about her?”

“It’s truly out of sight, out of mind for you, isn’t it?” Kei says, dumbfounded.

“What does your brother care?” counters his father. “He has his own life. He’s an adult.”

“He’s your _son_.”

Kei pushes the car door open. Snow swings in and he steps out, his shoes sinking into the powder. He leans to glare into the car where his father sits. The keys glint as they dangle from the ignition.

“Do me a favor,” he drones. “When I move out, grant me the same treatment.”

The toothpick house stabs into his brain like he’d been there just this morning; like he’d watched the beautiful wood trim bathe in late winter sunrise. But he hasn’t seen it in weeks. Only when his fingers grasp the cool metal of the garage door handle does Kei realize: he hadn’t said a word to his brother either.

________________

  
The same as when he laughs, Yamaguchi kisses with his whole body.

“Tsukki, ah,” he whispers, coaxing pressure from Kei’s mouth as he pushes against him.

Kei’s shoulder blades dig into Yamaguchi’s headboard. It hurts but not enough to notice beyond the way Yamaguchi squeezes his thighs around his hips. They’re firm. They’re warm. Kei wants to dig his fingertips into the denim of his jeans, sliding and rubbing until it singes his skin. But instead, his hands anchor on Yamaguchi’s shoulders as they kiss—someplace safe. Contrarily, Yamaguchi’s hands move freely over him. He tugs at Kei’s earlobe one moment and the next he smoothes his palm down his neck to rub at the base of Kei’s throat and it distracts Kei to the point where he neglects to kiss back, proccupied with the weight of Yamaguchi’s hot hands on his skin.

“Hey,” Yamaguchi murmurs, and Kei regroups.

Yamaguchi’s fingers swoop to the back of his neck. They twitch in his hair as he tips Kei’s head back, bright blond between tan fingers, the angle letting Yamaguchi kiss into his mouth. Yamaguchi presses the fingertips of his opposite hand into the center of Kei’s chest. Kei counts up and down from five and lets Yamaguchi lick his teeth, more aware of his soft tongue than the very light and air in the room they occupy. Kei tilts his head so Yamaguchi laps warmly into his mouth and, with a sharp exhale, Yamaguchi rises further on his knees above him. The vantage point is interesting. Kei feels simultaneously cared for and encroached upon and he flips between the extremities with each moment. His overwrought fingers grip the fabric over Yamaguchi’s shoulders. It’s stiff and starchy—a new shirt. Yamaguchi pulls himself away to puff hot breaths on Kei’s cheek, fingers sliding from his hair to curl around the side of his neck. A shiver rattles down Kei’s spine. 

“You got goosebumps, Tsukki.”

“Yeah,” he breathes.

Yamaguchi grins. He throws his arms around Kei’s neck and hugs him tight. Their hearts drum within their connected chests. Kei drops a hand to his back. Yamaguchi’s overt, versatile affection spins circles around him, makes him dizzy. On their clock, Kei is the hour hand, spun round and round by Yamaguchi’s frenzied second hand. Yamaguchi drags his lips down Kei’s jawbone as he draws back.

“The way you are,” he mumbles, “when we kiss, I mean—s’different than I imagined.” He glows wine red and pushes his hands against Kei’s chest, swallowing as their body heat transfers. “I thought about it a _lot_. The way you tilt your head so you can kiss me deeper—wetter, ah—the way you pull back and those sounds click and peel between us, our mouths, you know, and how you focus on my hands. It’s nothing like I thought, but _fuck_ , it’s good. Shit, um—Tsukki, I’m really—”

He swaps the tail end of his thought for a kiss, dry and poignant. Kei opens his mouth into it. Yamaguchi’s voice is rough, raw with honesty and confession. It melts warm in Kei’s ears. He burns hot. Yamaguchi’s hands bunch into his t-shirt. He kisses him quick. Kei slows him down with both hands on his back, pressing to starchy fabric and feeling his muscles shift and twitch beneath his palms. Kei groans involuntarily. It’s muffled by Yamaguchi’s mouth and at once, Yamaguchi’s hands release his shirt to crawl up the sides of his neck, fingers parted over his ears. He holds and tilts his face as he swallows each breath Kei offers. Embers flare in Kei’s gut. He feels himself getting hard. His eyes squeeze shut. Yamaguchi must be, too because he holds himself away from Kei now, hips pulled back and shoulders tipped forward.

His steadfast compliance to take such things unhurriedly at Kei’s request makes Kei regret voicing it in the first place. But a heap of strings and wires tumbles around his stomach at the notion of such vulnerability, such soft and facile malleability in the hands of anyone but himself. Maybe it’s because loving him is still something Kei believes Yamaguchi will grow out of, the same way toddlers’ toes burst from their baby shoes and balloons lose every molecule of air when packed with enough to pop. 

Kei breaks from him. Yamaguchi pays no mind—just pulls a pillow over his lap and sits back to catch his breath.

________________

  
Tsuru looms over him.

“He likes girls more than boys, you know. He told me.”

Kei kneels by the front door. He tucks his finger into the stiff heel and slips his shoe on.

“You’re a way to pass the time, that’s all,” Tsuru continues. Her socks invade Kei’s peripheral vision—red and blue zigzags. Yamaguchi has worn them before. Kei tugs at the thin tongue of his shoe and pulls out white laces, damp from clinging snow. Wet rubber soles squeak on the genkan tile. Kei turns his attention to his opposite foot. Tsuru steps closer and her toes curl over the wooden lip of the vaulted floor. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“He’s only with you so he won’t leave for college a total virgin.”

Kei’s fingers still around looped laces. His throat tightens like he’s swallowed a golf ball.

“Shut up.”

Tsuru balks. “You can’t tell _me_ to shut up. I’m not Tadashi. I’m not a pushover.”

“He isn’t a pushover,” says Kei. “Go away.”

“Are you kidding?” Tsuru snarls. She keeps her voice low and growling; anything louder would draw Yamaguchi from his room. She steps down to stand over Kei, digging her nails into her hips. “Oh my god, Tsukishima. The only reason he’s settling for you is because you just never _go away_. You’re like a bad fucking rash.”

Kei longs to liquefy. He wants to spill into the ruts between floor tiles until Yamaguchi comes and wipes him up. His insides turn and tie into knots and he stands, eyeing her. Her impressive height throws Kei off—they haven’t stood near one another in years.

“What,” she challenges, “you want to say something?”

Kei is unused to her confrontations. Their derisiveness ordinarily occurs in passing. Faced with it head on, Kei furls like a leaf under a heat lamp. He clenches his teeth and patiently smoothes out his edges. He waits for Yamaguchi’s parents to come through the door, for his younger siblings to get home from school, for the bones of the house to break and collapse. He waits for Tsuru’s rage to cool and harden. Instead, it boils over. Kei takes a pacifying breath, pushing his tongue against his incisors.

It’s safer to lift the lid from the pot than to let the fire eat right through the metal.

“What did I do to you?” he mutters.

Tsuru’s eyes ignite. Kei drops the lid but the flames resist wildly and it clatters to the floor.

“It’s what you did to my _brother,_ ” she snaps. She doesn’t give Kei a moment to remind himself of everything he has ever said to Yamaguchi, ever done to him before she barrels on, “He used to talk about _Mom._ Now he just talks about _you._ Do you have any clue how frustrating that is for me? For our dad?”

Kei stares hard at the wall behind her head.

“No,” he breathes, going numb.

“He spends her birthdays with _you_ , not me. Dad does his own thing, and that’s whatever, but—it isn’t _fair_. I have to fight my own brother for time with him without you. I don’t _get_ it. Why you? Of all people, why _you_?”

Tsuru goes rigid, like steel. The fire wavers. Kei grants her eye contact to compensate for his lack of answers and her eyes soften, not like cotton but more like magma, darkly glittering and melted from her wild fury. They threaten to trickle from their sockets, sizzle over her freckles and pool at the point of her chin. Tsuru presses a fist to her mouth. The other clenches in the space between them. She drops them both to her sides. Like a pricked balloon, she deflates. Even the curls in her hair seem to lose their shape.

“I thought it’d feel good to tell you off,” she admits. “Instead, I just feel sick.”

She wilts right in front of him. Kei picks his brain for a reply—something organic and human. 

Tsuru mutters, “Just leave me alone.”

She leaves him and stalks down the hallway. His shoulders fall at the click of her bedroom door. His teeth unclench. Kei sees his body lose shape and drop to the tile, lifeless. His shoes squeak on the floor as he pivots toward the hall down which Tsuru retreated. How much of himself is similar to her like Yamaguchi said? What percentage of his own self matches hers? Can Yamaguchi only handle Kei because he has learned to handle his sister? If not for Tsuru, would Yamaguchi have given up on him years back?

Kei detests her. But does he owe her? 


	12. desert landscape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have learned that even landlocked lovers yearn  
> for the sea like navy men.
> 
> \- brothers on a hotel bed / death cab

The living room couch is bare of cushions and the flat fabric beneath boasts a brown coffee stain. The carpet soaks up a clumpy, orange-red splatter from sauce flung across the room. Chairs sit crookedly on the marble tile, pushed back from the kitchen table. The stovetop burner tick, tick, ticks helplessly, begging for a flame to catch. The scent of gasoline drips from the cupboards, the walls, the furniture. It reeks. Kei flips off the burner. He sets an empty pot in the sink. Smeared over its insides is the same clumpy chili oil mixture on the carpet and Kei runs the faucet over his ring finger when the wet spice globs onto him, desperate for attention. 

The painting on the living room wall hangs askew. It dangles from a single nail. Its bottom corner digs into the back of the couch, sharp enough to split the leather if one lacks caution retracting it. Within the sharp gold frame stretches a desert landscape. The sky is bright blue. Hopeful. A sole cactus erects from the yellow sand. A flower blooms near its apex and its pink petals reach as if they aim to span the entire canvas. Kei steps until his knees hit the the couch. He hadn’t noticed the flower before. He sees his mother’s painting in colors and patterns, in shapes and vague dimensions because it’s just always been there, slung into place above the couch.

Had he noticed it when he was small and simply forgotten? Or had it eluded him then, too? Akiteru would have been old enough to notice—he began junior high just before their father received the painting. It was for his fortieth birthday. Did Akiteru see the flower? Did he memorize the bright sky and the vibrant sand and the stretching petals? Did he share it all with Kei? Did he keep it to himself?

When Kei reaches into the back of his mind, his fingers come away sticky with cobwebs.

His parents have always been older, grayer than the parents of his peers. Kei told himself when he was younger that it was the reason his parents and Yamaguchi’s failed to grow close like their sons, the leaves of Yamaguchi’s parents too broad and sun-soaked to thrive near the gnarled, knotted branches of Kei’s own. Distracted, he presses the heel of his palm to the bottom of the golden frame and lifts. The couch’s leather cries out. Kei winces and pulls his hand back to his side.

He leaves.

For an hour, he sits on a frozen park bench. Kei forgives it when it seeps into his jeans, thawing under the late afternoon sun. The snow is suddenly burdensome. It is not pretty like glitter but irritating and ineluctable like a massive, bumbling dog, slobbering icily on Kei’s shoelaces and the bottommost inch of his pant legs. He yearns for its absence. He wants it to melt coolly into the grass and revive it, rejuvenate all the plants and bring them to life once more like they existed months prior. He wants to return to Yamaguchi but, feeling stupid for just being with him, Kei denies himself. He gnaws incessantly at the fleshy inside of his cheek.

The idea of crossing Tsuru’s line of fire so soon squeezes his guts into pulp and he tries to press his palms over the lesions but he hemorrhages anyway, her accusations filed sharp like cat claws and cutting, yanking more pigment from him with each moment. He tries to shove them away but they lie like cannonballs in the divots of his insecurities.

Tsuru wants time with her brother. Stubborn but menaced, Kei will grant her that.

“Did you check on them? Your mom and dad?” Yamaguchi asks when Kei calls.

“No,” he answers dumbly.

“What? Why not?”

He just didn’t. He tells Yamaguchi as much.

“Kei, what if they hurt each other?” His overt disappointment salts Kei’s cuts.

“They didn’t.”

“But you don’t _know,_ ” he frets.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei replies sternly, like a parent, and Tsuru’s incriminations flood his head again.

Yamaguchi gives up. He says _fine,_ he says _okay_ and tells Kei to come back over, or that he can come over before work; that he misses him already and he can help scrub up the chili oil and rehang the desert painting that stretches finitely in its golden frame but Kei is frozen to the bench despite its thawing, despite its dripping, the steady water droplets creating deep, narrow holes in the snow beneath. 

________________

  
Kei doesn’t walk Yamaguchi to work because if he does then he will stay, and if he stays then he will walk him home, and if he walks him home he will spend the night.

“I can’t,” says Kei.

“What? Why?”

“I’m organizing practice notes at Sakanoshita. Kageyama said he’d buy me food.”

Yamaguchi throws a hand over his chest. “You’re cheating on Shimada Mart?” 

“Guess so.”

It’s cute when he insists, “I’ll buy you food. I’ll buy you _more_ food.”

“You can buy me food tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he chirps, pleased.

“See you in the morning.”

Yamaguchi halts. A tape clicks and rewinds behind his forehead. “Not tonight?”

“This might take a while.”

“Four hours a while?”

Kei slides his tongue along his bottom lip. He looks away when Yamaguchi glances down.

“Maybe.”

Yamaguchi’s stare peels away layers of skin and jiggles at the knobs of locked doors.

“Okay,” he decides after a moment, shrugging. “Text me.”

________________

  
Kei’s parents are fine. Physically, at least.

He finds his father on his hands and knees on the kitchen floor. He scrubs a vicious line into the clean marble, absolutely ignoring the ugly oil stain in the living room. Certainly, it has set into the carpet now and forever. They have walked over it for days. Yesterday, his mother walked straight through it. The spot his father abuses glares whiter than the inches around it, shiny beneath the scrape of steel wool. His knuckles glow red. How long has he been doing that?

“How long have you been doing that?”

His father looks up. “Oh.” His hand stills. “When did you get home?”

“Just now,” Kei answers.

“If you’re seeing Tadashi later, pick up another pack of these.”

Rising onto his knees, he jostles the steel wool in his palm. He then tosses the pad to the floor and presses his palms to his thighs. He lifts a hand to nudge his tie further over his shoulder and it leaves a dark, greasy stain on his slacks; hand shaped like the ones little kids smack to paper with nontoxic paint.

“I just left him.”

“I see,” he grunts. “How many days does he work in a week?”

“Five.”

Kei’s father nods crookedly as if ticking a check mark in the air with his chin.

“Why?” Kei questions.

He figured his interruption would break his father’s loop but the marble pulls him in again. He doesn’t notice the stain on his pants and Kei doesn’t tell him. He recalls Yamaguchi’s birthday party and the little girl on the couch with chocolate frosting smeared across her forehead. None of her friends told her. When did she finally notice? Did her mother pull her close in Yamaguchi’s driveway that night and untuck a handy napkin from her pocket, surreptitiously dabbing away the spot before anyone else saw? But the damage had already been done. Why hadn’t her friends told her? Why didn’t Kei tell her?

Down the hall, the door to his father’s office is ajar. Kei pushes it open, just enough to look in.

His mother crouches behind the desk. Papers flip and wobble as she rifles through drawers stuffed to their limits. Looseleaf pages litter the carpet, pooled into rumpled piles. There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the piles beyond the drawer in which the papers resided. Her hands work quick, filing through stacks and paperclips, eyes wide in the dim light.

The first thing Kei feels is relief. If she found it, it would be over: the thin blue binder that holds glossed sheets and packets, the toothpick house emblazoned proudly across their fronts. Boulders, sick of teetering, would crash to the canyon floor. His father tucks it in the pocket behind the passenger seat of his car. If he kept it there, Kei’s mother would have found it ages ago. Kei searches the floor but he doesn’t see it strewn brightly among the chaos on the carpet. If she found it, the wreckage would be infinite. It would chain Kei to this house forever.

His mind changes so fast he sees sparks.

He slips from the room. He feels tall, skyscraper-like as he looms over his father in the kitchen. Taller than he ever has. Powerful. He could let his mother keep searching, prematurely cutting the weak string that binds them all to each other. He could tell his father and twist the string tighter, threads separating until they cling by a single, screaming strand.

Either way, something breaks. It’s just a matter of when.

“Dad,” he says, and his father looks up at him. “Mom’s in your office.”

His father leaps to his feet. It is the most mobile Kei has seen him in years. He slips on the steel wool pad and takes only a moment to brace himself before he hurries across the living room, pausing at the mouth of the hallway to grip the doorframe and pin Kei in place with a grave stare.

“Our final house appointment,” he whispers harshly. “Next week.”

The powerful feeling wafts away in a cloud of gray smoke. Kei feels small, pebble-like; a brat of a toddler tattling to their teacher because his classmate spent five extra minutes on the swing. The instant, heavy loss is staggering. It scoops out essential parts of him and splatters them on the kitchen floor. Like paintballs, they burst.

His father leaves, he shouts, his mother shouts back, and Kei kicks his guts around the kitchen floor.

________________

  
After a week of blowing him off, Kei walks Yamaguchi home out of habit and because he misses him, genuinely, pathetically—his voice, his bed, the yellow light of his house and its consistent chatter. Maybe his twin won’t be home, anyway. Maybe apprehension can cease its slow crawl up Kei’s throat for good.

“Wanna go to the movies?” Yamaguchi asks, hopping at his side.

A bit of red fabric peeks through the collar of his jacket. He forgot to take off his apron. It isn't that cold out, but Kei reaches over and pulls his zipper to the top of its track. 

“Okay.” He suggests, “Let’s see the new horror one.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Yamaguchi hisses. “Tsuru wants to see it, too.”

A thin sheet of snow crunches noisily under their shoes. Kei glares down at the white road.

“It’s fine. Go with her.”

“I’d rather go with you, Tsukki.”

Kei tries again, “You should go with her.”

Yamaguchi worms his hand into the crook of Kei’s arm despite the way he crosses them. He curls his fingers around his bicep. Once, twice, he squeezes.

“What’s it matter to you?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

Yamaguchi wiggles his fingers. They tickle. A grin breaks quietly over Kei’s lips.

“Look at you!” Yamaguchi crows. “All smiling and shit! Kei, you’re so beautiful.”

“Stop that.”

“I mean it, though.”

“I know you do.”

Tsuru better eat up every second she spends with her brother—fucking devour them like she’s been starved, the way she implied. 

_______________

  
“My mom is at the end of her rope.”

Yamaguchi pauses halfway into his shirt, arms bent and thumbs tucked into the collar. Kei glances at his bare stomach. Would he rise and fall with Yamaguchi’s breathing if he sat in the dip below his rib cage? Would it be better if he sat atop the angle of his hips and pressed his palms to his stomach instead? He could see the movement, then. Or would it make more sense if he pressed his hands to his chest?

“Huh?” grunts Yamaguchi.

“I think my mom is losing it,” Kei says again.

The tiny fan in the corner of the club room whirs. Yamaguchi stares.

“Your dad is literally cheating on her, and you think your mom is losing it because she went through a _desk_?”

Kei bristles. He swallows and his spit slides dryly down his throat.

“I didn’t think about it like that,” he croaks.

Yamaguchi pulls his shirt over his head. Fabric flutters past his belly button. Kei wants to lay him flat and pour water on his chest to see where puddles gather. Then he could drag his fingertip through the tiny pools, watching the molecules grab the ridges of his skin. Yamaguchi zips his volleyball bag with a sharp sound and steps close to rest a hand on Kei’s shoulder. His thumb smoothes back and forth, back and forth, rustling the fabric there.

“It’s hard to see the full picture when you’re the middle puzzle piece, I think.”

“Yes,” Kei breathes. “I want to be the one piece the manufacturers leave out on purpose. The one people go insane trying to find, thinking they lost it.”

Yamaguchi snorts a laugh and drops his hand back to his side.

“Me too,” he agrees. “But I think two missing pieces would be too cruel.”

“Two’s too cruel,” says Kei.

“Too cruel to take two.”

“To take two is two too cruel.”

“Too true.”

“Our last walkthrough of the toothpick house is on Monday.”

Yamaguchi blinks. “What’s that mean?”

“Dad is buying it, I guess.”

The floor shifts a little beneath their feet—just an inch or so, but enough to notice the change.

“Want me to come?” Yamaguchi wonders.

“You don’t have to.”

“Well, sure, but—”

Harsh morning sunlight breaks into the room when Kageyama throws the club room door open, so quick that it bounces off the opposite wall and crashes into his shoulder. He winces, peeking through his fingers. Yamaguchi turns over his shoulder. Kei eyes the curved red line over the back of his neck, forever raw from the strap of his Shimada Mart apron.

“If you guys are hooking up in here, I am gonna be so pissed off.”

“You’re an idiot,” Kei tells him.

“We’re three feet apart,” informs Yamaguchi.

Kageyama drops his hand. He looks between them.

He reports, “Practice is starting.”

“We’re coming,” Kei says.

“Keep it to yourself.”

“I am going to kill you,” he insists. He pushes past him. “We aren’t desperate enough to hook up in the fucking club room.”

“Maybe _you_ aren’t,” Yamaguchi lilts, following them out.

Practice is the perfect distraction. It isn’t like two years ago when he couldn’t be bothered, and it isn’t like last year when he focused until he got migraines. Kei practices out of habit, plays out of habit, receives and blocks and sprints out of habit because if he were to deviate from this rut, there would be nothing to run back into when he inevitably melted under the burning pressure of idle hands. The gym is comfortable and familiar, like the toothpick house.

“I don’t work tonight,” Yamaguchi rejoices on the walk home, his face red from exertion.

“I know.”

“Do you want to hang out?” He kicks a rock down the road and it gets stuck in one of the sorry lumps of snow that remain. “Maybe at your place?”

“If you want.”

Yamaguchi stops abruptly. His bag bounces against his hip.

“Why are you doing that?” he asks.

Hands in his pockets, Kei turns his way. “What?”

“ _That_ ,” Yamaguchi insists. “You know, telling me I don’t have to go places with you. Pushing me to hang out with Tsuru. Saying you have other stuff to do. Dude, we went to the _dentist_ together until we were thirteen.”

“Did you just call me dude?”

“Kei,” he whines softly, dread pulling at his features. “Did I do something?”

“Besides calling me dude?”

“I’m serious.”

“ _No_ ,” Kei answers. His throat dries up again. He wants to get his water bottle but it’s thrown into his bag with everything else and he’d have to rummage around to find it, Yamaguchi’s eyes on him the entire time. “You did nothing. You are phenomenal. I just—I want you to have time with your siblings—your twin sister. Without me.”

“If this is you breaking up with me, I’m gonna have, like, four separate heart attacks.”

“Nobody said that,” Kei assures, peeling Yamaguchi’s hands from his chest.

They go limp in his grip. Yamaguchi squints like Kei speaks in tongues.

“Did Tsuru say something to you?” he asks.

“What?”

“She did, didn’t she?”

Kei flounders as bricks build a castle in his stomach. Yamaguchi’s stare is prying; a crowbar between Kei’s ribs. He knows his sister too well, and he knows Kei even better. But Kei would rather tattoo the words on himself every day with a hot ballpoint pen than repeat them to Yamaguchi so he can realize them as facts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're reading this i just wanna say thanks because i think about this story a lot. i'm consistently thinking about what to do with it and taking a fuck ton of notes in my phone. more often than not i start to believe that writing it, that writing in general, has kept me from splitting right down the middle. especially during college. anyway i'm really grateful to have anyone reading it at all and if it tends to pop up in your head even once when you aren't reading it and just going about your day then HOLY SHIT THAT'S COOL, and it's all that matters.
> 
> <333


	13. buzz

Yamaguchi has gotten a blowjob before. 

It tips Kei over and pours him out. But Kei scoops what’s leaked into his hands once and again and swallows it because it’s stupid, so stupid to feel he’s lost a race he wasn’t even in. What was Kei doing at the time? Was he reading or talking or sleeping while Yamaguchi was three streets over through brick and wood and cement, twitching and groaning and coming? Was anyone home? Or was he not at his house? Was he at someone else’s? How could he feel so comfortable there? Did he think of Kei when he came, or did Kei fail to occupy even a particle of the torrential downpour of thoughts that at any time occupies Yamaguchi’s head?

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Yamaguchi groans. “It was last year. Do we have to, like, unpack this?”

“I would like to.”

Yamaguchi shifts on Kei’s bed. He takes great interest in the span of cream carpet between Kei’s feet. Kei shifts too. The handle of the desk drawer digs into his shoulder blade but to move entirely would be an ordeal. To scoot six inches forward would displace the air between them and the conversation that hangs there. So Kei ignores the ache, sorry for the heat he smacks to Yamaguchi’s cheeks.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks again.

“Because you don’t care about that stuff.”

Kei swipes his finger across the carpet until it burns. “But I care about you…”

Yamaguchi groans again, frustrated. He holds his face in his hands, shaking it once, twice before sliding his fingers into his hair. “I care about you more,” he admits, dropping his hands into his lap. His hair sticks out from his head like he’s been electrocuted. Kei will smooth it down later. “Besides, Tsukki, you would’ve just been like, _TMI, Yamaguchi_. So I didn’t say anything.”

Kei stares. “When—in my life—have I ever said _TMI_?”

Yamaguchi grins. “Right now. You just did it just now.”

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“Who was it?”

“Really?” He blinks. “You want to know that?”

Shame nips at Kei. But curiosity _bites_ , rabid.

“Yes,” he breathes.

Maybe it was someone he knows. Maybe it was someone Kei has never met. He can’t decide which is more believable. Maybe it was someone from their class. Maybe it was someone from Kageyama’s class. Maybe it was someone Tsuru knows. Maybe it was someone younger. Maybe it was someone older. Maybe it was someone Kei likes. Maybe it was someone Kei hates. Maybe it was someone on the volleyball team, either this year or last, and Kei will have to quit all school-affiliated sports now and forever.

Maybe it was a girl, and Tsuru was right.

“ _Ghost Kid_?” Kei wheezes when Yamaguchi tells him.

The name sends Yamaguchi’s eyes to the ceiling. Ghost Kid was someone Kei knew. Ghost Kid was in their class. Ghost Kid was someone Kei hated, but for petty reasons like he smelled earthy and neglected to button the cuffs of his uniform shirts. Ghost Kid befriended Yamaguchi when Kei was looking the other way.

Then he disappeared all at once, like the sound of a single clap. It took Yamaguchi ten days to stop mentioning him.

“You liked him?” Kei utters, voice faraway. “Romantically?”

Yamaguchi shrugs his shoulders—an inch up, an inch down.

“Oh.” Kei’s tongue is heavy and dry in his mouth.

“Hey,” says Yamaguchi. “There’s nothing to be jealous of, Tsukki.”

Kei lifts his gaze from the carpet, but not quite to Yamaguchi’s face. He stares at where he knows Yamaguchi’s collarbone hides beneath his sweatshirt. He traces the slanted, hidden line up and down, up and down, up and down. The space between the bed and the floor seems massive, now, cratered and colossal. Kei would fall in if he tried to bridge it.

“I’m not,” he replies.  


“Come on. I _know_  that voice, okay. I—”

“I was wondering what I was doing,” Kei interrupts. “When you were—uh.”

“When I was what?” wonders Yamaguchi.

Kei lifts his gaze, meets his eyes.

“When you were coming,” he answers.

Yamaguchi stares hard at him. Kei looks away and covers his face with his hand. Hot skin cradles hot skin.

“Um,” Yamaguchi hums, holding the consonant between his lips. 

What would change if Kei were to make him come? Would he be louder? Would he be quieter? Would he come quickly or so slow, gasping and tightening around Kei’s fingers or in his mouth, maybe, twisting, heaving, lungs stretching wide and red in his chest? Could Kei illicit such things in the first place? And how embarrassing would it be, really, if he couldn’t?

Ghost Kid was kind. He was gentle, and he was tentative.

Is that what Yamaguchi wants? Someone more like himself?

________________

  
Two weeks and Kei’s father will sign papers that claim the toothpick house as his own.

Mere paper seems too feeble for such a decision. There should be something more solid, something more binding if it’s going to snatch Kei from his glass case and drop him down the prize tunnel to be grabbed by fresh new hands. Maybe something with fire or stone—a burning brand or a deep carving. But not paper. 

Like the day his parents returned from their trip, Kei awaits the explosion; his father has not told his mother. He has not told her about the house. He has not told her about The Professional. He has not told her about his plan to move out and extract her son in the process. Kei suspects his father will tell her weeks after the move has transpired in silence, in the form of a brief and formal letter in the mail, crisp and blank where a return address is supposed to be. He will leave her to detonate on her own. The town will fill the resulting crater with fish and plants and water, forging a communal plot where families gather and play and fall in love in the place where Kei’s home used to be.

His bedroom is cold. Kei pulls the throw blanket his mother knitted when he was eleven over himself because it’s easier than getting off his bed, pulling his comforter down, and climbing back in. The house is silent save the low, constant drone that flows through the bedroom door—his father’s voice is calm. He is a placid sea for now. Kei can’t hear what he says from the guest room across the hall but his inflections and pauses are familiar nonetheless. His father’s voice would be comforting, maybe, if Kei broke down and let it be.

His stare flits to his desk. Inside the small box in the righthand corner rests a stack of bills—a gift from his parents for his eighteenth birthday. He hasn’t touched it in months. The box gathers dust. But Kei finds a kind of earnest satisfaction in the fact that he has so much money in his immediate possession. He could use it tomorrow if he had to.

But why would he have to? If it’s for _emergencies_ , why can’t he name them?

Doom carves a hollow in his stomach. Nausea nestles inside. At the same moment he realizes that his father speaks on the phone, probably sitting on the edge of Akiteru’s old bed as to slope the mattress downward, his hand braced on his knee, Kei’s own phone buzzes to life.

“You called me phenomenal.”

Yamaguchi’s voice teeters, trapped between smug and stupefied. Kei sits up.

“Yes,” he confirms. Yamaguchi clarifies anyway.

“The other day after practice—you said I was phenomenal.”

“I did.”

“At what, though?”

Kei picks at the fringe of his blanket. “I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.”

“I think you’re phenomenal too, Tsukki,” Yamaguchi insists.

“That’s my word. You have to think of another.”

“Okay, Tsukki.”

“Decide, and get back to me.”

“Okay, okay.”

Yamaguchi breathes into the receiver. Kei’s eyes flutter shut like he feels it on his cheek.

“Kei?”

“What?”

“Were you sleeping?”

Kei twists around and pulls all his pillows into a pile at his back. He leans into it and sighs.

“No.”

“Oh,” says Yamaguchi.

There’s a mischievous pause. Yamaguchi’s smooth cadence fills his head, occupying it like water fills a glass. He sees Yamaguchi’s hand encircled around a glass, short and molded; the kind Kei’s mother uses not with alcohol but water, soda, and juice. Condensation fits into the lines on Yamaguchi’s palm. It’s wet when he wraps his fingers around Kei’s wrist. Into the receiver, Yamaguchi sighs like he feels it, too.

“So,” he drawls, “what’re you wearing?”

Kei’s mouth quirks into a grin. “Jesus, Yamaguchi. Can you not?”

“Sorry. It slipped out.”

The corner of a firm pillow pokes into his shoulder. He nudges it away. He hasn’t been to Yamaguchi’s house in a week. It is a new record that Kei would rather not document. Yamaguchi’s bed is soft, just like him. It is eternally warm, just like him, sunshine spilling miraculously over its white, puckered sheets, even in the dead of night. The mess of Yamaguchi’s bedroom makes his bed more desirable—a safe nest in the middle of scattered leaves and poking branches.

“A hazmat suit,” Kei responds belatedly, now desperate to keep him on the phone like if he hangs up Yamaguchi will blip from existence like a glitch. His nest bed and sunshine sheets, too. “One of the rubber, chemical barrier ones where you can’t make out anything except my vague, humanoid shape. And maybe my eyes, although through an inch-thick slab of plastic.”

“That’s all I need,” quips Yamaguchi.

“Gross,” Kei replies, his skin flushing pink regardless.

Yamaguchi’s laugh is bright and gentle and Kei shoves off his blanket because he’s too hot. He pinches the hem of his shirt. He tugs. The fabric pulls tight and smooth over his chest.

“Can just anyone buy a hazmat suit? Or do you have to have some kind of license?”

“Anyone can,” Kei answers. “You can get them online.”

“You don’t say.”

“Do not buy a hazmat suit online.”

“You can’t stop me.”

The guest room door swings open with enough force to knock into the opposite wall.

Across the hall, seas rage. His father’s voice ripples and booms around his mother’s. Kei cradles the phone between his shoulder and ear like something precious; like Yamaguchi is curled up inside instead of in his bed miles away, lying star-shaped on his mattress. Kei’s father probably slid his phone into his pocket when his mother came in. Either that or he grips it tight in his hand, knuckles white and popping. His parents’ waves peak and crash. They strip the wallpaper from Akiteru’s old bedroom, the first-floor bathroom, and the hallway. Staring gratefully, Kei admires his bedroom door. He marvels at its leaden strength that holds back even tsunamis.

He hangs up the phone before dark blue water crashes through.

________________

  
Kei only buys a water bottle so he can press it to his forehead. His migraine pulses, irritated by his attempts to alleviate it. The cooler at Sakanoshita chills more efficiently than the one at Shimada Mart. Kageyama pencils important dates in a new planner: volleyball games, practices, his parents’ birthdays. Kei hears every particle of lead as it scratches into thick parchment. The plastic that enclosed the small notebook unfurls on the table by Kageyama’s elbow from the way he’d balled it up, quick and tactless.

Ukai sits behind the far counter, smoking. Smoke trails snakelike from the end of his cigarette and curls in various rings above his head. Some are so small he could slip them onto his fingers like wedding bands. Others grow so loose he could hoop them around his waist.

Kei’s head buzzes.

Waterlogged from the night before, he feels heavy. He might crack the plastic chair beneath him into pieces and have to scoop them into his hands, head bowed in shame, resilient droplets still dribbling from the ends of his hair. Kei leans onto his elbow and presses the water bottle to his temple.

He asks, “What’s the worst your parents have ever fought?”

Kageyama glances at him. “Fought?”

“Argued,” Kei rephrases, shifting the cool plastic so it soaks up his flush, “whatever.”

“I don’t know.” Kageyama clicks his pencil to get more lead. “It’s not like they do it in front of me.”

Kei stares.

His forehead splits open and the fire behind it escapes, melting the plastic bottle in his hand and sending its contents splashing over the tabletop in the corner of Sakanoshita, seeping into the pages of Kageyama’s new planner, dripping from all four sides of the table and into their laps and shoes.

Instantly, Kei dries up.

Instantly, he despises his mother and father for everything they have ever done. Trapped in their cage with them, he has heard every fight, every argument, every nasty, vile, _searing_ word his parents have said to one another, _about_ one another, and squirmed as they pressed the fiery accusations into his skin and left him with oozing, infected brands of their hostility.

They could have fought in secret. They could have saved him, then.

Instead, he hosts burns from their wild flames. He boasts scars from their cutting slurs, pressed against the rusted bars of their cage. His brother got out. Just in time, Akiteru got out. He was left with only the squeezing tension of the bars he slipped in between. But Kei bleeds all over carpet and tile and wood—precious, honey-colored wood—and he is not inspired, capable, or strong enough to negate the smeared stains from marble and grain and fibers, arms bent and hands raw and scrubbing, fingers gripping at pads of steel wool.

All they had to do was open the cage.

________________

  
It isn’t cold enough to warrant Kei’s winter jacket anymore so he carries it in the crook of his arm on his way to Yamaguchi’s. He’s cutting it close, but Yamaguchi should be home from work. Stars twinkle overhead and as Kei stands on Yamaguchi’s porch after decades of step after step after step, he can hardly remember the walk that got him here.

Yamaguchi’s eldest brother lets him in.

“ _Tsookie,_ ” Misashi yawns. “It’s my bedtime, Mom says.”

“It sure is,” Kei tells him.

“But I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Okay. Yes.”

It was foolish of Kei to believe the house may be different after just a week without him, like Hana would switch out the drapes and move the furniture and replace hardwood with thick, feathery carpet. But it’s the same. Of course it’s the same. The only difference is the whereabouts of various toys and trinkets. The foam dart gun rests atop the television—out of Fumika’s reach—and the legos have been poured from their bright yellow bin. A tiny robe adorned with moons and stars lies draped over the back of the couch.

Splashed with warm, yellow light, the house glows. Kei wants to curl it around himself like a blanket. He wants Yamaguchi to curl around him like a blanket—he’s in his room, completing an assignment that isn’t due for another week like a good student. Kei forgets how that feels.

Yamaguchi turns toward his bedroom door. “Tsukki.”

“Tadashi.”

His pencil clatters on his desk. He picks it back up.

“I missed your house,” Kei admits.

“I missed you in my house,” counters Yamaguchi.

“I missed you missing me in your house.”

“You alright? You look bad.”

“Thanks.”

Yamaguchi rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean. Not bad, just…You look like someone in a really old painting, you know?” He tilts his head, thoughtful. “How they look sad, kind of, even though they’re just staring. But they look really beautiful, so maybe you’re supposed to look past that woe. Who were those guys one million years ago who painted really pale, pretty people?”

“Pre-Raphealites,” says Kei. “Will you hold me?”

Yamaguchi misses it. “Huh?”

The desk chair squeaks as Yamaguchi spins to watch him cross the room. Kei can make-believe himself small, legs tucked underneath him in the middle of Yamaguchi’s bed. In the lamplight, something glitters on his desk: deep blue shards of the broken ocarina, piled fondly beside the frame that encases a fading photograph of his mother. The shards look gentler. Yamaguchi has filed them down. Kei’s palm finds his chest and presses. 

Butterflies. Kei has butterflies.

“Hold me,” he says again.

Yamaguchi grins, slow like a sunrise. He lets out a breath.

He meets Kei on his bed, crowding him in the V of his legs. The mattress protests their shifting weight. Yamaguchi brings Kei to him with a hand on the nape of his neck and Kei comes easily, tipping into him. His chin hooks over Yamaguchi’s shoulder. Kei starts to lift his hands to rest someplace safe, someplace like between Yamaguchi’s shoulder-blades, maybe, or the middle of his back. But it’s not like they're kissing, and the obligation to anchor them is lost. His heart thumps in his chest.

He rests his hands on Yamaguchi’s lower back and links his fingers together. Yamaguchi nods into his shoulder. Kei exhales, eyes falling shut. Tiny footfalls stampede up and down the hall. Another pair joins them and in a moment, they both fall silent. A distant door clicks shut. Yamaguchi’s house is so constantly, constantly alive; a heart thumping inside a drywall ribcage. Kei grins.

“I talked to Tsuru,” Yamaguchi mumbles.

Kei’s grin falls. “What?”

Kei had managed to cut her out of his head, like a tumor. He simply excavated her. Yamaguchi lodges her back into place, now, pounding with his fists to ensure she stays. Kei waits for the influx of apprehension, of humiliation, of uncertainty. He’s tempted to pull back from Yamaguchi in case they leak into him.

“About what?”

Yamaguchi’s voice stays low, as if he talks in his sleep. “About how you wouldn’t walk me home. About how you wouldn’t come over.”

Kei stills. Like he’s dropped a stone into a deep, deep well, he waits for the impact.

“I was upset, and—and she told me what she said to you about our mom.” Yamaguchi drags his fingers up and down, up and down his back. He turns so his nose presses to the shell of Kei’s ear, his voice falling further as he mumbles, “I’m allowed to cope with it the way I want. All of it.”

“Yamaguchi,” Kei whispers.

“I’m not six anymore,” Yamaguchi insists, grabbing Kei tighter, “and she can’t tell me how I should feel.”

Kei nods. He moves a hand to the back of Yamaguchi’s head and buries his fingers in his hair. The strands are silky. He showered before work this afternoon. He slackens under his touch, leaning his chin on Kei’s shoulder again. Kei’s eyes find the broken ocarina. It winks at him in the dim light. Yamaguchi grabs at the back of his shirt.

“I’m gonna talk about you when I want, and I’m gonna talk about Mom when I want. That’s it.”

Again, Kei nods. “Okay.”

He leans forward like if he presses hard enough into Yamaguchi, he’ll sap some of his courage. He did not have enough to combat Tsuru’s indignities. But how did she have enough to sling them in the first place? After all, wasn’t it she who lacked the courage to admit the entirety of her offenses to her brother?

“God,” groans Yamaguchi suddenly. “You just wanted to be held. I should have talked about this later. Why didn’t I talk about this later?”

“Relax.”

Kei flattens his hand on his lower back. His pinky rests on the hem of Yamaguchi’s shirt. He strokes the thin dashes of the seam. Kei closes his eyes and lifts the fabric just enough to rub his ring finger in a slow, steady line, cataloging each small bump he feels as a result of Yamaguchi’s telltale shiver. Kei touches him in a place other people do not get to. Not his arm, his shoulder or his face, but a single inch of skin just above the waist of his shorts. Smooth, hot, firm.

Tsuru couldn’t tell Yamaguchi what she said. Not completely. Kei won’t tell him, either. Instead, he will bury it all beneath other, softer things, like the faint creak of the mattress as he and Yamaguchi lean languidly into one another and the pads of his fingers as he caresses the dip in Kei’s throat.

“I missed your house,” Kei tells him again.

“Your skin buzzes under my fingers when you talk,” murmurs Yamaguchi.

“You’re pressing on my trachea.”

“It did it again. Say more.”

“I need to chew on something.”

“Buzz,” he echoes.

“I wonder if my parents would notice if I bought a snake and kept it in my room.”

“Buzz. Buzz.”

“I should have walked you home.”

“Buzz, buzz. Buzz.”

“Can I sleep here tonight?” Kei asks.

“Yeah,” breathes Yamaguchi.

A big, boisterous laugh rockets down the hallway, chased by a hearty shush.

“You didn’t say buzz,” says Kei.

“I didn’t feel it that time.” Yamaguchi drops his hand to the middle of Kei’s chest. “You know when your heart beats in your fingertips? Or, no, it’s more like tiny bits of your heart split off and do their own thing.” Here, he draws a plus sign over Kei’s heart with his finger. “And they each fall into each one of your fingertips and pulse there. One, two, three—they’re doing it right now, I feel them—five, six. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Kei answers, his ring finger pulsing on the small of Yamaguchi’s back. “I know what you mean.”

What Kei neglected to realize was that, upon prying open his doors to find him empty, Yamaguchi has the opportunity to fill him up—to place within him sound and light and courage until he is brimming with the certain things he lacked—until they both must lean against Kei’s doors with all their weight in order to close them again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <333


	14. the weight of it all

There is a forest behind the high school that’s just barely visible from the landing outside the club room.

“I wanna go in there,” Yamaguchi proclaims.

“What? The woods?”

“Yeah,” he responds, nodding eagerly. “I don’t want to graduate without going in there.”

Kei shakes off his umbrella and water droplets fling to the floor. It’s still stubbornly wet despite being left inside for the duration of practice. The way rain patters the roof of the gym is nice and consistent, tiny, hollow thumps way above their heads. It lulls Kei to sleep. He can’t quit yawning.

From the landing, he watches the rain wash away the last of the snow.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because.”

“Oh.”

“Because it’s always been there. We walk past it every day but we never go in. Don’t you think that’s weird? What if there’s something cool in there? Something the other kids have seen but we haven’t?”

Kei comes up with nothing but busted beer bottles, trees, and used condoms.

“Fine,” he says.

Yamaguchi looks up at him. “Fine, what?”

“Let’s go.”

“Oh. Wait, really?”

Kei shrugs. He nods.

“Okay,” calls Yamaguchi, his face open and bright. “Hang on, let me grab my umbrella.”

Yamaguchi is so childlike when he does things like this: pulling worms from the creamy mud, thrusting his squirming collection toward Kei in his cupped hands, then apologizing and returning the worms to where he found them as not to displace them entirely. Kei trails behind him. He carries the umbrella Yamaguchi brought but neglects to use.

The rain halts all at once when they reach the barrier of trees, like they tripped the wire that stitched up gray clouds overhead. The tall trees threaten to burst them again; their dark, wiry branches poke the sky, bare of leaves. A final raindrop splats on the lens of Kei’s glasses when he looks up.

“These trees make even you look short,” Yamaguchi tells him.

They slip between the wall of thick trunks to find the forest’s interior sparse. Trees grow yards from one another, robust and dotted leisurely over the matted, fertile floor. The ground is doughy. Mud globs onto the soles of their shoes. Wet twigs snap under their feet as they wind through the dripping woods.

When Kei was seven and Akiteru was thirteen, they went into the mess of green trees behind their grandparents’ house in the suburbs. They took the dog they had for a week. Most recollections Kei still possesses with that dog—most recollections Kei still possesses with his brother—are dreamlike. They are hazy. In his head, they are smeared with a thick gloss as to make them glow despite the fact that they are lackluster. It’s the same trick old film directors used on camera lenses decades ago with Vaseline. The dog caught a hare but let it go when Akiteru screamed at him. They left after that, not forty feet from the forest edge.

Every four seconds, Yamaguchi looks over his shoulder to make sure Kei follows.

“See anything cool?” he hollers.

“Beer bottles. Trees. Used condoms.”

He stops. “You do not.”

“No. But I bet we will.”

“There’s a cigarette butt over here.” Yamaguchi turns and kicks at the ground. He sends a cluster of leaves, matted together with mud, splattering against a nearby tree trunk. It sticks to the bark for a moment before dropping unceremoniously to the ground. He admits, “I thought the trees would be less spread out. I thought it would be really dense in here, like the way it looks from the outside.”

“Like Aokigahara,” says Kei.

He sits on the trunk of a fallen tree. Wood and bark jut out from where it snapped but the trunk itself is smooth, weathered down over the years. Rainwater seeps into the seat of his pants. He brings his bag into his lap to shuffle through the front pocket. He chooses sunflower seeds over gum or mints. He can toss their hulls on the ground when he’s through sucking the salt from them. Yamaguchi straddles the fallen log, sitting meters away like he’s mad at him, but Kei knows he isn’t.

“Now our pants are wet,” he announces.

“Worse things have happened.”

“Sorry,” Yamaguchi says, flicking moss from under his fingernail. “This was lame.”

“Not really. It’s nice,” Kei replies.

“It is?”

“I’m here, you’re here,” he clarifies. “That’s nice.”

“ _Kei_ ,” gushes Yamaguchi. He slaps the bark with his hands, giddy.

Kei tears open the plastic packet of seeds. He presses one to the roof of his mouth and looks between the trees that surround them. They look naked, stripped of ornamentation and color. Raindrops drip from the highest branches and plop onto the bed of soggy leaves below.

“It’s so…” Kei pauses. “Not green.”

“We can come back in late spring, just before graduation. It’ll be green then.”

Kei snaps the sunflower seed between his teeth. Before today, Yamaguchi hadn’t mentioned their graduation for weeks. Do his parents talk to him about it with elation? Do they shake his shoulders and tell him it’s so close? Do they ruffle his hair, asking what gifts to give? Do they tell him they’re proud?

Maybe graduation is something that pesters Yamaguchi constantly, endlessly while sitting at his desk in class, standing behind the register at Shimada Mart, digging up Hinata’s spikes in the gym or at night, blinking at his bedroom ceiling. Yamaguchi doesn’t stuff it down like Kei. He doesn’t snuff out the thought the instant it kindles, as though it were a fire in an oil factory. Yamaguchi nurses the flame, fans it, breathes it to life.

But Kei is flammable, and he is afraid.

________________

  
Fumika mashes Misashi’s face into the living room carpet. Yamaguchi stands over them and tugs at the back of her shirt, trying to pull her off but not really, laughing so hard he can’t keep his grip. Isao snaps legos together in his tiny hands on the boundary of the chaos. He glances up every few seconds to eye the television, leaning to the side when Yamaguchi breaks his line of sight.

“Say uncle!” Fumika chirps.

“We don’t even have an uncle!”

“It doesn’t matter, you just have to say it.”

“Misashi, say it,” Yamaguchi warbles through his laughter, “she bites hard enough to draw blood!”

Steam lifts from the mug on the bistro table. The table is meant for outside but it’s been wedged into the corner of Yamaguchi’s living room for years now, maybe decades, rooted to the carpet like a tree. If it were to be moved, the trenches beneath its feet would never level out. They would become valleyed homes for legos, marbles, and balls of lint.

Yamaguchi’s father pours coffee despite the fact that it’s dusk. He keeps his fingers around the handle of his mug and sets his book on the table to flip its enormous pages. When he sets it flat, Kei sees grids, blueprints, dashed outlines of bolts and beams—like his mother’s art books but so, so different. They’re more organic. If Kei’s mother’s books are skin and polish, Yamaguchi’s father’s are blood and muscle.

Kei glances at his own mug, untouched.

“Something wrong?” Yamaguchi’s father asks him.

“No. Just tired.”

He hums. “So am I, son.” Kei’s glasses fog up when he brings his mug to his lips. He wipes the lenses with the hem of his shirt and replaces them. Yamaguchi’s father turns another page. “A bird flew into the front window yesterday morning,” he mentions. “Saw it when I left for work.”

Yamaguchi’s sister has given up. She sits cross-legged on the floor in front of him, toying with a purple drawstring pouch. Misashi leans sleepily into her shoulder. She pours the pouch’s contents into her hand and Isao scoots across the carpet to see.

“What kind?” asks Kei.

“Tiny little thing. I moved it before Isao saw—it would’ve broke his heart.”

“Yeah.”

“My buddy at the site said you can put things on your window to stop them from flying into the glass. A thin coat of vegetable oil, he said, but it sounds like a hassle. Messy, too.” Yamaguchi’s father nods at his youngest children. “Their mother would kill me.”

Fumika holds a row of bobby pins between her teeth, sticking them one by one into Yamaguchi’s hair.

“You can adhere a certain film to the outsides of your windows. It makes them look solid, and you don’t see a difference from the inside. Can I ask you something?”

Yamaguchi’s father takes a long, warm drink of coffee. He smacks his lips.

“Shoot.”

“Yamaguchi told me,” Kei mutters and then hesitates. He starts again. “Yamaguchi told me you started to work in construction just after his mother passed.”

Her mention is a weight; Yamaguchi’s father’s shoulders sag, pressed by invisible hands. The entire house lowers just the same. The furniture creaks. The windows shiver. The ceilings slide closer to the floor. The entire foundation sinks into the soft mud, moistened by weeks of rain and melted snow.

“That’s right,” he breathes.

The weight of it all traps Kei’s jaw shut.

He pries it open and finishes, “What was it that you did before?”

“I cooked in a restaurant.”

“You—you were a chef?”

Yamaguchi’s father hums. His fingernails clink against his coffee mug. Kei blinks away from his steady stare, his tongue tracing the groove between his two front teeth. He studies the tabletop, marked with pens and crayons and forks over the years, nicked by sharp edges, faded from various careless spills. His thumb finds a deep ring, brown from tea or coffee. He follows the lower portion of the stain back and forth, back and forth, in the shape of crescent moon.

He still works with his hands, Yamaguchi’s father. He still chops and saws and measures. Did any of his skills carry over? Or did he have to start anew, blank and fresh? Was he nervous? Did the memory of his wife calm him, or did she hang over him at every site, staring down from her seat upon stacks of lumber and steel beams, waiting for him to forget her? And if she ever did, does she still?

Kei’s coffee has lost its steam. Yamaguchi doesn’t face his direction anymore, spun round by his siblings, so Kei stares at the back of his head. Yamaguchi’s father replaces his mug. It knocks the tabletop with a thud, heavier this time as to draw Kei outward again.

“I used to cook for him all the time. Him and his mother, his sister,” he recalls, fingers curling into his palms like he grasps the recollections in his hands. Fondly, so fondly it hurts, Yamaguchi’s father shakes his head. “So picky. He was the pickiest eater. Don’t know why I tried. Nothing too cold, nothing too small. Nothing red. Still don’t know what that was about.”

“Nothing like now?” Kei croaks. He's breathless from the rush of cracking open a door he always figured was locked.

Overjoyed by his participation, Yamaguchi’s father grins. “Oh. Absolutely not, Kei. And yet so skinny. Just like his mother. Him and Tsuru both. I know they don’t get that from me.” He chuckles in a way that can only be described as _fatherly_ and an empty place within Kei aches like he’s pulled a tooth from it. Raw, bloody nerves drip and tremble. 

“You—I mean—I don’t see you cook a lot.”

Dismissively, Yamaguchi’s father brushes his hand over the tabletop. Crumbs scatter to the carpet.

“Lost all that.”

“Your kitchenware?” Kei asks, eyebrows knitted together. “Your recipes?”

Softly, Yamaguchi’s father shakes his head. He nudges his mug an inch to the left, and then reconsiders and nudges it back. He keeps his eyes on the rapidly cooling coffee that clings to its porcelain insides.

“I could have it all—all the same pots and pans, all the same knives. I could fix a dozen dishes I’ve made one thousand times. At work, at home, whichever, a dozen years ago.” He jabs his finger toward the hallway. “I’d use the same spices and every ounce of every ingredient, right there in that kitchen. But they wouldn’t taste like anything. No,” he decides, shaking his head, “they wouldn’t taste at all.”

Kei breathes in. He breathes out. Yamaguchi’s father looks squarely at him and he stares back.

“If you've got love,” he states with finality, “hold onto it.”

Kei nods. It’s all he can do.

Yamaguchi’s father withdraws into his book. Its spine creaks. Gravity skews. Kei lightens, floating from the chair until his head bumps the ceiling.  He fights his way back down and plants himself at the little bistro table again, pecked to death and meant for the outdoors. His fingers wrap around a handle of porcelain. The coffee in his mug has gone cold. But the words of Yamaguchi’s father linger in the air, and they warm him like steam. 

________________  
  


“What about all the extra bedrooms? What’re they for?”

“Guests. Storage. I don't know.”

Kei flicks a sunflower seed and it skates across the hardwood.

“That’s eight,” says Yamaguchi, watching it zip between his hands. “Guests?”

“I don’t know, Yamaguchi. I don’t really care.”

“I was thinking,” he starts. He lines a seed up with the grain of the wood and fires. It hits between Kei’s thumb and forefinger and bounces away, twirling in place before it stills. Yamaguchi frowns. He lines up another. “At this rate, we might be gone at college before you even move in here.”

His next shot skates between Kei’s hands. Kei chews his lip.

“That’s four,” he mutters.

“We graduate six weeks from tomorrow. I don’t really know long it takes to move into a house, though.”

“Do I have to beg you?” Kei asks. “Do I have to beg you not to talk about graduation?” 

Yamaguchi stares at him. His head falls to the side, like each thought inside gathers just behind his eardrum. He looks sweet, and he makes Kei want to touch and taste him. Yamaguchi’s steady blue fuses with Kei’s combative red and what comes out is deep, honest purple.

“Whether I talk about it or not, it’ll happen. Six weeks from tomorrow.”

“I know that,” Kei answers.

“I like the begging aspect, though.”

“Yamaguchi.”

“Don’t you mean ‘Yamaguchi, please’?”

“Oh my god.”

“Sorry. Kind of.”

A tinge of red hits his cheeks and Yamaguchi crawls to Kei, seeds snapping under his knees. He turns Kei’s face into his. He places a long, soft kiss on the apple of his cheek. Kei closes his eyes. He admires the proximity and senses the bareness of the room around him, his but not quite his, and Kei listens hard as if he’ll be able to hear the scratch of a signature a floor below—black ink on professional white paper.

Had his father gone through with it? Had he claimed the house as his own, tugging it gradually into his possession the way the moon pulls the tides? Had The Professional congratulated him? Had she whispered it as she rested her hand on the small of his back like a secret?

Kei’s father secured a bottle of champagne in the trunk of the car, wrapping it in newspaper and elastic cables. But he didn’t bring it into the toothpick house. Maybe he wanted to surprise her, The Professional. Maybe surprises are romantic. Maybe he forgot and kicks himself for breaking a moment to retrieve it, swearing at himself as he snatches the chilled bottle from the trunk. Had they clinked their glasses in celebration and watched bubbles rise to the top?

Yamaguchi draws back and pushes his forehead to Kei’s.

“Let me know the instant you can talk about it,” he breathes. “Let me know the instant you make plans. I can’t make mine if I don’t know yours.”

Kei lifts his hands. He tugs Yamaguchi’s hair between his fingers. Against him, he nods.

Yamaguchi retracts from him and Kei commits to memory the press of his lips on his cheek, the warmth of his breath on his face. In time, the room will be furnished. It will be neat and stacked with Kei’s things: his desk, his bed, his lamps and tables. He will forget how it looked when it was as it is now. He will forget the bare wood and sharp corners, obstructed by clean, familiar furniture. But he will remember the press of Yamaguchi’s lips. He will remember his warmth.

Kei croaks, “You broke our playing seeds.”

Bits and pieces lie crunched on the hardwood between them. 

“Whoops. Good thing we’ll have plenty of time to do seed soccer in here. What was the score?”

“Eight to four.”

“I won?” asks Yamaguchi.

“Definitely not,” answers Kei.

Yamaguchi grins. It expands through the empty room, filling all its sharp corners. He swipes the pieces into a tiny pile with the side of his hand. Kei offers up the empty packet. Yamaguchi drops in the cracked pieces and brushes the salty remnants from his palm. 

Kei’s father signs the papers.


	15. slake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm so stoked to upload this. i hope you guys have fun reading it, omg.

“Get him off my bed. I don’t want to see him.”

“But he’s my friend.”

The packet of fruit snacks crinkles when Kei bats it away.

“I disapprove. He looks too fucking cocky. Him and his eyelashes.”

“Just try one,” Yamaguchi insists, jostling the gummy snacks in his hand.

“Look at the way his hand is on his hip like that. There isn’t any reason for that.”

Yamaguchi pulls the half-empty packet closer to himself and inspects it. His mouth twists into a frown. Kei fumbles with a loose thread on the throw blanket he draped over his shoulders like a cape. He glances at the fruit snacks cupped in Yamaguchi’s palm. He actually wants the strawberry ones. It’s just more fun to complain.

“Oh my god,” Yamaguchi snorts. “The banana’s hand _is_ on his hip.”

“I told you.”

He pops the handful into his mouth anyway. 

With his mouth full, he says, “Let’s see how many we can stack on you.”

The house is silent. There are no pitter-pattering steps in the hallway, no jolly laughs in the living room. Kei hasn’t seen his father since he declined his offer to drive him and Yamaguchi to practice. In his absence, Kei’s mother will occupy her own bedroom or the basement between bouts of walking the house like the dead, hands slippery with dish soap or caked in clay dust. She already ate. There is a single plate on the drying rack in the kitchen.

Kei and Yamaguchi could go in the living room. They could play Kei’s father’s records lowly so his mother wouldn’t hear. They could play them louder if they shut the door to the basement. But instead, they quarantine themselves in Kei’s bedroom, sunken into his downy comforter and plucking feathers that poke through. Yamaguchi sits on his knees between Kei’s legs. He plucks fruit snacks from their crinkly packet one by one, his face pinched in concentration. He stacks a gummy tower on Kei’s stomach. As still as he can, Kei lifts himself onto his elbows to watch.

“If I get to five, you have to eat one.”

“I could cheat,” Kei tells him. “I could move.”

“Yeah. But, like, don’t.”

Yamaguchi nudges the fourth into place. He curls his hand over Kei’s side to steady him but the touch is sudden, unexpected, and Kei’s stomach tightens compulsively. The fruit snacks scatter. Yamaguchi blinks at them. He glances up at Kei.

“I didn’t know you were sensitive there.”

“Me either.”

A red flush streaks his face. He brings his hand back to himself.

“I only got to four,” he reports.

“A valiant effort,” notes Kei.

Yamaguchi’s grin is steadfast. Kei reaches up and presses his fingers to the bright color, his cheeks catching fire when his thumb grazes the corner of Yamaguchi’s mouth. He swallows a breath as Yamaguchi shifts just so, just enough to capture the tip of Kei’s thumb between his lips. His breath is warm, damp on Kei’s skin. Yamaguchi’s tongue is hot as it rubs gently over the pad of his thumb. Kei can’t pull away now. His free hand splays over his face, hiding.

He asks through his fingers, “Can you—can you feel the ridges of my fingerprint when you do that?”

“Yeah,” Yamaguchi sighs around his thumb. “It’s weird.”

He leans forward and Kei’s thumb slides into his mouth, right over his tongue. Yamaguchi’s front teeth rest on his knuckle. They scrape his skin when Kei’s hand twitches. Warmth crawls through him, thick and slow like honey, through his thumb and into his hand, then down his arm to flood sweetly into his stomach. Yamaguchi curls his tongue so his thumb rests in the divot, like a cup. Spit pools there, nice and warm, and Kei presses his thumb into the reservoir. There’s a tiny snap where air escapes.

Yamaguchi wraps his fingers around Kei’s wrist. Gently, he pulls him out.

“Can you feel my taste buds?” he wonders.

Kei nods. “Yeah. I felt them.”

The air in the room cools the spit on his thumb. It’s the only thing they’ve done besides kissing; this small, simple thing. Yamaguchi’s tongue is soft. His mouth is snug and inviting. Kei lets his hand fall to the bed although he wants a turn for all his fingers behind Yamaguchi’s teeth instantaneously. His middle finger in particular. Because it’s the longest.

“You want me to take your glasses off?” asks Yamaguchi. Kei nods again. Yamaguchi’s knee bumps the inside of his thigh when he leans forward. Plastic clinks faintly on the nightstand. He returns and smoothes his thumbs where black plastic rims rested under Kei’s eyes. “Now you look naked,” he teases.

Kei rolls his eyes. Yamaguchi chirps a laugh, ducks down, and kisses him. Kei rises into it. Yamaguchi lingers on his mouth, his lips slow and sure, pulling from him and returning with added pressure. Kei lets him. He lies on his back and waits for his mouth, eager and appreciative. Yamaguchi’s body radiates as he arches and twists over him. Kei’s stomach, chest, his thighs—they all gather his heat. Already, Yamaguchi rocks into the space between them. The momentum is smooth and appealing, pushing sparks this way and that. Kei takes in a breath. He lifts his hand and rests it on Yamaguchi’s thin waist. His fingers shove fabric out of the way so he grips skin; tan, firm, and stretched over Yamaguchi’s bones. Yamaguchi breathes harshly into him. He juts his hip further into Kei’s grip. Kei squeezes.

“Yamaguchi,” he sighs, undone by the frailty of his own voice.

His heart knocks against his ribcage. Sitting up, Yamaguchi lands on him a weighted stare. His hands grip the fabric Kei cast aside and in a single motion, he lifts off his shirt. His chest falls and rises with shallow breaths. It’s so easy to see, now. The shift from usual context—busy in the clubroom, swallowed by the scent of deodorant and rubber—is staggering. Kei blinks. His tongue massages the roof of his mouth, his stare sliding from the tilt of Yamaguchi’s clavicle to his navel, where it sticks. His mouth is dry. His tongue stalls its back-and-forth.

“There’s a ring of freckles around your belly button.”

Yamaguchi shakes his bundled shirt from his wrist and looks down.

“Yeah, Tsukki,” he confirms. “You never noticed?”

“I haven’t been this close, I don’t think,” Kei mumbles.

A flush spans Yamaguchi's chest. He nods. The color spills over his tawny skin, shadowed from the way he leans. Yamaguchi circles his navel with his index finger, once, twice—only twice but it dizzies Kei anyway, this small spin, the pad of his finger looping through the halo of soft brown freckles that adorn him. Kei wants to spin, too. Courage stacks in his chest, tall and narrow, adhered in place by the sticky sparks in his stomach. But his hand loves the jut of Yamaguchi’s hip too much to leave it.

Kei meets him halfway. Yamaguchi leans as their mouths push and pull, his chest bumping Kei’s with each tilt of his jaw. Kei receives his kisses steadily, gratefully, and he kneads his fingers into the skin of Yamaguchi’s hip. His hand stills when Yamaguchi licks the underside of his tongue, like he can’t concentrate on both caresses at once. His focus pulls hard to his mouth. He licks back. Yamaguchi hums, so low he almost growls. A string in his chest draws Kei up so he sits, and he pushes his exhale into Yamaguchi’s mouth. 

Gently, Yamaguchi holds Kei’s bottom lip between his teeth as he rises on his knees, rearranging himself so he sits astride Kei's thighs. Yamaguchi’s weight is comfortable. It’s exciting. Kei twists his fingers into the bedspread by his hip. He drags his other hand up Yamaguchi’s side. The slide is slow and staggered; his palm is damp. Kei’s insides thrum like plucked harp strings. Yamaguchi pulls from Kei’s mouth to link his arms around his neck. Kei stares at the stretch of skin at the junction of Yamaguchi’s neck and shoulder, his restless tongue pushing at his incisors.

Yamaguchi is the only one who hugs him. Kei’s parents don’t hug him. The last time his mother hugged him was when Akiteru left for school. Kei sees his brother still, sitting snug in the passenger seat of a friend’s car and driving away, tires crunching on the asphalt—just fucking leaving him there on the driveway, their father on one side of him and their mother on the other. His brother doesn’t hug him. He would if he were raised by anybody else. But Yamaguchi hugs him, and he hugs him tight. He hugs him like there are hordes of hands at his back, gripping, clawing, tugging him in the opposite direction. He holds him. He holds onto him. His iron grip is impossibly gentle. Had Yamaguchi’s father given him the very same counsel he gave Kei? 

Yamaguchi breathes in his ear, labored and fluctuating. Kei knows that pattern. It both tears through him and sews him shut, although tighter than before. Yamaguchi holds his hips away from him still. He won’t vaunt his arousal when he knows Kei will do nothing about it, and Kei worships him for it. But Kei has slouched long enough. He straightens his shoulders, the small shift bringing their chests flush against one another’s. Yamaguchi’s heart pounds through double layers of skin and muscle.

Kei inches back just enough to lift his thigh beneath Yamaguchi and press it between his legs. 

Yamaguchi coughs a jagged exhale. His arms tighten around Kei’s neck and Kei stills his tremble as heat from Yamaguchi’s groin seeps into his thigh and sweeps through him, lingering in his legs and stomach. Yamaguchi holds a low note in his ear. It tapers into shorter, higher-pitched utterances when Kei rubs his thigh against him, front and back, front and back, in a firm, unhurried shift. The bed gives the slightest squeak. Yamaguchi rattles one hard, heavy shudder against him and retracts. Kei chews his lip. He nips at torn pink flesh and Yamaguchi gazes at him, his eyes hooded, his bangs stuck fast to his forehead.

“Tsukki,” he murmurs. It’s almost a question.

Kei shifts his leg higher and Yamaguchi hardens on his thigh. Kei feels him—the tightening of his skin, growing, firming up. Yamaguchi’s hands lift to cup Kei’s jaw. His fingers flinch. Kei takes his hand from Yamaguchi’s hip and curls his fingers around his wrist. The other lifts from the bed to fan sore fingers over his stomach. Yamaguchi’s muscles tighten and release beneath the touch.

“Think I’m through not touching you,” Kei murmurs back.

Yamaguchi breathes a laugh. “You rhymed.”

“Nevermind.”

“ _Kei_.”

Face in his hands, Yamaguchi tilts Kei’s head as he kisses him again. Kei nudges their tongues together. He groans; Yamaguchi’s mouth is wet, and the hot slickness of it soothes his apprehension as Kei feels out his teeth. Humming back his approval, Yamaguchi releases Kei’s jaw to scrabble at his hand. He presses Kei’s palm firmly into his stomach, rubbing his tongue on the roof of Kei’s mouth as he pushes downward. Kei peels back when the heel of his palm bumps denim. Yamaguchi lets go.

“Sorry,” he pants, fist closing around the air between them.

Kei shakes his head. So close like this, the tips of their noses bump together. Kei’s heart floods and bursts inside his chest, coating each one of his ribs before it trickles into his stomach where it bubbles, bumping and roaring until it’s all he hears. Yamaguchi’s panting slips in every now and then, like breathy intermissions. Kei inhales. He breathes out. He lowers his hand, fingers parted over the strain in Yamaguchi’s jeans. He rubs once, twice, three times. Yamaguchi’s voice breaks in his ear. He tips forward, his arms locking around Kei’s neck.

“ _God_ ,” he coughs. “Tsukki, are you sure?”

“Yeah. Are you?”

“Ages ago,” sighs Yamaguchi, arching into his fingers.

“Yamaguchi.”

“What?”

Kei swallows the lump in his throat. His fingers bend back when Yamaguchi arches again. 

“You’re really—really hard.”

“Duh,” Yamaguchi exhales on a laugh, “it’s _you_.”

He buzzes a long, drawn-out hum into Kei’s ear when Kei’s fingers mess with the button on his jeans. Yamaguchi still rocks despite the absence of friction. It makes it difficult for Kei to drag his zipper down its track. But he does, and the metal is cool between his thumb and forefinger. There’s a whirlwind of contrast between it and the damp warmth on Kei’s palm—he cups Yamaguchi in his hand, suddenly unwilling to wait the moment it would take to pull him out.

He’s leaking. There’s a spot of navy on the otherwise blue fabric of his boxers. Kei’s eyes squeeze shut. The sparkling weight below his navel has never been so dense. It drops deeper as Yamaguchi breathes a gentle moan. The sound nestles comfortably in the shell of Kei’s ear, burning red.

Kei groans, “Yamaguchi.”

“Mhm,” Yamaguchi hums, nodding into his shoulder.

Kei drags his palm up the length of Yamaguchi’s cock. His skin catches on damp fabric. His fingers twitch near the head and Yamaguchi expels a sharp breath. Kei brings his free hand to rest between Yamaguchi’s shoulder blades. Yamaguchi curls into the touch, simultaneously humping into Kei’s hand. Kei stutters. His heartbeat floods his ears.

“Gonna come in my pants,” Yamaguchi gasps. His arms tighten around Kei’s neck. 

Kei’s eyes crank open. “Wait, no—I want to—I can’t really get to you like this.” Yamaguchi untangles himself when Kei presses his fingertips into his chest. “Here. Move back. Just for a minute.”

Yamaguchi shuffles backward on his knees. Blotches of red glare from his cheeks, his chest, his abdomen. Kei glances from one to another as he shuffles back too, wincing when his shoulder blades hit the headboard. Yamaguchi’s eyelids hang over his eyes, copper and cloudy. Kei makes room for him in the V of his legs.

“Okay,” Kei rumbles. “Put your back to my chest.”

Yamaguchi shoves his jeans down his hips and complies. Kei eyes the wet stain on his boxers, fingers clenching at the bedspread on either side of him. Yamaguchi settles himself between his legs. Kei holds his breath. When his stomach rests against Yamaguchi’s lower back, he exhales. As Kei’s fingers release his sheets, Yamaguchi’s twist into them. Kei’s hand dips beneath hot, damp fabric. Yamaguchi’s dick slides wetly into it. Kei pumps him once, immediately—experimentally.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Yamaguchi hisses.

Kei’s breath rushes from his body and returns in an instant. His chest heaves. The swift, solid swoop in his stomach feels like it did the night Yamaguchi slept behind him, the fresh din of the record player still humming in his ears. But this time Kei can brave the warmth. He can hold it in his hand.

He slips the elastic band of Yamaguchi’s boxers over his dick and Yamaguchi hisses again, exposed to the cooler air of Kei’s bedroom. Kei pumps him once more and lets his hand slide over the head, completely off. He wants to see it. He stares down the flat of Yamaguchi’s front. The flush on the head of his dick is the same as the one on his stomach. The color contrasts with the small cluster of dark brown pubic hair but the shade on Yamaguchi’s cheeks is the most intense; it nearly hides his faintest freckles. Kei crosses his arm over Yamaguchi’s chest and grazes his searing cheek. Yamaguchi unclenches the bedspread and lies his hand atop Kei’s, the same way he does when they kiss, with his convex palm inching up and down Kei’s fingers. Intimacy swallows him whole.

Kei curls his wet fingers around his length. He drips as Kei slides his hand slowly up and down, up and down, quicker each time and with more intent. He pauses to drag his thumb in semicircles just below the head. So slick with diluted precum, the repetition is fast and comfortable. Tufts of white sheets peek between Yamaguchi’s trembling, clenching fingers. His other hand grips Kei and shakes.

“ _Kei_ , ngh,” he whimpers, legs bending and unbending, restless. The bed creaks beneath them.

“This is how I stroke myself,” Kei mutters.

He twists the circle of his fingers left and right, right and left as he inches his hand up Yamaguchi’s dick. It throbs when he reaches a certain spot—about an inch and a half below the leaking head, on the very underside—so Kei lingers there, his thumb petting the intersection of hard, pulsing veins. Yamaguchi gasps. He digs his fingers into his thighs. Kei arches into his back and heaves a sigh at the friction, pumping Yamaguchi’s entire length faster, his hips jutting forward when Yamaguchi stiffens, shoulders rising and face tilting upward, telling Kei in a breathy, elevated whine that he’s going to come in his hand.

“Tadashi,” Kei sighs into his hair, and Yamaguchi comes.

His cum coats Kei’s hand. It drips between his fingers. It trails down the lower portion of Yamaguchi’s stomach, his skin dyed a hearty red. Kei strokes him until Yamaguchi tenses again and then he sinks into him all at once, breathing deep and quick, his muscles loose from their constant tensing.

Gently, Kei lifts the band of Yamaguchi’s boxers and rests his soiled hand flat on Yamaguchi’s abdomen. Warmth seeps into his palm. His other hand slips into Yamaguchi’s hair, his fingers driving through soft strands. Yamaguchi melts against him. Kei curls a damp lock of chestnut hair behind his ear.

He jolts when Yamaguchi settles himself deeper into the junction of his legs.

“Kei, let me take care of you, okay?”

Kei sucks in a breath. He bites out, “Just—do that.”

“Do what?”

Against his groin, Yamaguchi shifts again. Kei hums. He nods, eyes shut tight. Anything more—anything _wetter_ —and Kei may tear at his seams, sparks spilling from the slits in his skin, singeing his sheets. Kei fits himself to Yamaguchi’s back. His skin is hot. His shirt sticks to his chest.

“You want me to rub against you?” Yamaguchi asks. “That’s it, are you sure?”

Kei nods again. Yamaguchi nods back, eager in a way that kindles flames in Kei’s chest.

“But, here. It’ll be easier if we—like earlier.”

Like the morning he used the birdbath key and the sun showered Yamaguchi’s quiet house with soft oranges and yellows, they lie on their sides, faces pulled close. With a hand curled behind Kei’s knee, Yamaguchi brings his leg up. He slides his thigh in between. He drags it slowly over Kei’s erection, pulling in a sharp breath between his teeth. Bare skin drags over denim. Kei has to hum, has to expel some kind of energy to keep himself afloat while Yamaguchi’s heat and friction pour in all around him. His bottom lip shakes where he catches it between his teeth. Yamaguchi’s gaze is constant. Even as Kei’s eyes flutter shut, he feels his eyes on him. Physically, like a jacket.

“Tsukki,” he murmurs.

Kei kisses him first. He pushes his lips apart with his own, breathing into him a harsh sigh. Yamaguchi’s mouth was waiting for him. It’s wet and warm, hollow, inviting and supernal. Kei drags his tongue across the velvet softness beneath Yamaguchi’s. He strokes him there, forth and back in time with Yamaguchi’s thigh. Yamaguchi slides his hand from behind Kei’s knee and curls his fingers over Kei’s waist. He rocks him, rocks Kei’s dick harder against his thigh while he lets Kei into his mouth, rubbing and tasting and satisfying.

Kei kisses him until he needs every breath to himself.

“Yamaguchi,” he rasps.

“Yes,” sighs Yamaguchi.

“Feels really good,” Kei promises.

“I know. I know.”

Yamaguchi hums lowly like it comes not from his throat but deep inside of him—his stomach or the very center of his chest. Kei rolls his hips into his thigh. Yamaguchi’s skin is hot through his jeans. Kei’s body tightens; a bow with its string pulled back. He quivers. He shakes. His hands curl into fists on Yamaguchi’s back.

A final jolt rattles down Kei’s spine as he comes, pulled flat to Yamaguchi’s chest. He groans into his bare shoulder, the front of his teeth pressed against tawny, freckled skin. He rocks into Yamaguchi’s thigh. They’ve lost all rhythm but Yamaguchi rubs him anyway, kissing his cheek, stroking his waist, panting into his ear. Against his chest, Kei slackens. The room around them slows its spinning and his eyes find time to focus, stuck fast to the most pigmented freckle on the bridge of Yamaguchi's nose.

Yamaguchi grins so wide it squints his eyes. He bumps their noses together.

“After this,” he pants, “how am I ever gonna get off to you in a hazmat suit again?”

“You did not do that,” Kei pants back. He ignores the cum in his pants and on his sheets where he’d wiped it from his fingers.

“No. Another year and I might have, though.”

“I heard you can buy them online.”

“No way,” breathes Yamaguchi. “I heard that too.”

He peels back from Kei with effort. The air between them is hot and sticky like summer. Yamaguchi finds his palm and presses it to his. Damp skin on damp skin. A small, slow slide. It’s the same touch they accomplished in Yamaguchi’s bedroom, in the dark with his phone lying on his chest, the air thick with apology about the house they now possess and for a moment, Kei is transported back there only to drop into the present at once and be grateful for it—grateful for the change time brings, the attachment, and the opportunity.

“I have a denim burn on my thigh,” Yamaguchi mentions offhandedly.

Kei breathes a laugh. Yamaguchi does, too. Pulled from them in handfuls, their breath wades warmly into the corners of the room like bathwater. It ghosts over the desktop, dampens the carpet, and fogs up the window, emphasizing its deep, jagged crack. One, two, three, four—their hearts beat in their fingertips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <333


	16. passenger seat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're over 50 thousand words!!!!! shit dude.
> 
> happy reading! <3

On Yamaguchi’s living room floor lies the current volleyball roster; a single page of names and numbers.

“I need to figure it out so Tanaka-san will stop calling me.”

“What does he care?” asks Yamaguchi, titling the paper his way.

“He needs to know if Kageyama makes as poor a choice as he did,” says Kei.

“Hey,” Kageyama grunts. “Shut up.”

Yamaguchi pushes the roster toward him.

“He’s kidding. Who do you think should be next year’s captain, Kageyama?”

Kageyama scans the list again, mouth pursed as he repeatedly snaps the lid on and off his highlighter. He should stop playing with it. His fingers are dyed yellow. Kei tells him as much and Kageyama grunts again. Concentrating, his mouth pulls into a firm line. The silence of the house beyond them is thick; it’s the sole, gracious hour of the afternoon following high school release but before elementary lets out. Yamaguchi keeps glancing at the door.

His twin takes advantage of the quiet, too. She scours the glossy pages of a magazine and blindly navigates her way past the three of them, sprawled on the floor and through the living room, swerving around couches and end tables. Her steps whisper on the hardwood of the adjacent hallway.

“How does she do that?” 

“Do what?” asks Yamaguchi.

“Not run into stuff,” Kageyama replies, turned toward the hall.

“We’ve lived here one zillion years. Oh, and we never rearrange the furniture.”

He turns back. “Cool.”

Kei snaps his gum. He taps his finger on the paper between them— _thwack._

“Hurry up. Choose.”

“It’s not that easy, Tsukki.”

“Yeah. It’s not. Hinata didn’t know, either. So help,” Kageyama drones.

Kei regards the roster, but he cannot conjure the faintest opinion of anyone. He knows only positions and heights. Maybe specialties, too. He is useless. He withdraws to the couch as if to admit himself as such and, no longer needing to include him, Kageyama and Yamaguchi pull the roster between themselves. They suggest and recall and discuss. Kei smoothes his gum into a thin, flat oval and fits it to the roof of his mouth. He drags his tongue over it.

He ostracized Kageyama for three days after he named Hinata vice captain over Yamaguchi. Regardless of titles, Kageyama consults him with team matters more often than he does Hinata. But more often than not, Kageyama consults Kei. Kageyama had enough sense not to inflict the official role upon him at the very least. Still, there is something to be said about the steadfast nature of Kageyama’s choice. He chose devotion over rationality. He chose Hinata over everyone. If Yamaguchi were captain, would he do the same? Would he enlist Kei as his auxiliary without a second thought and press him to his limits, twisting Kei’s limbs to wring out every drop of his support? Or would he elect someone who overflows with it, someone brimming with suggestions and strategies and sheer, unadulterated drive?

Kei swallows his gum. He pulls his legs onto the couch with him and something digs into the arch of his foot. He lifts the edges of the overstuffed cushions. A cork lies in the middle of them, nesting in a bed of lost coins and marbles. Kei takes it up between his thumb and forefinger. He sits back.

“What’s that?” Kageyama asks him.

“A wine cork?” supplies Yamaguchi.

Tsuru crosses the room again. She holds an entirely different magazine.

“It’s a champagne cork,” she insists as she passes. “Are you really sure you’re eighteen?”

“Yeah, but I’m just innocent and pure,” replies Yamaguchi.

“Yeah, right,” says Kei.

“ _Tsukki_.”

Tsuru actually laughs. Her snicker bounces down the hallway like a deflated ball. Kei balances the cork on his knee. He doesn’t retrieve it when it topples. Yamaguchi returns to the roster and scrutinizes it once again, running his finger over the highlighted names. The pad of his index finger smears the yellow pigment and he frowns.

“Have you considered him?” he wonders.

Kei glances up at Kageyama’s lack of reply. His stare is stuck to the mouth of the hallway.

“Hey. Hey, earth to Kageyama.”

The paper makes a wobbling sound when Yamaguchi waves it through the air.

Kageyama turns to him. “She didn’t hit anything that time, either.”

“I told you. One zillion years. No rearranging.”

“Oh.”

“So have you?” continues Yamaguchi. “Considered him, I mean? He’s really—”

“He isn’t listening,” says Kei.

Kageyama isn’t. Yamaguchi shoves his shoulder.

“Can you focus, please?”

A furious blush invades Kageyama’s face. For a split second, it reminds Kei of the flush he constantly inflicts upon Yamaguchi in the most arbitrary of moments—when Kei stares at nothing, when he slides library books back into place on their shelves, when he folds his laundry on his bed, fingers tucked into soft, fresh fabric. Yamaguchi follows the same train of thought.

“You like her?” he implores, blinking at Kageyama. “Like, with your heart and stuff?”

“I don’t know.”

Kei grimaces. “Good god, why?”

Kageyama stares away from them, at the wall. He runs the pad of his thumb over the smooth curves of his fingernails. He filed them after school. He files them every day. His blush can’t be bothered any longer and it slips from his face, his skin paling again, stretching over his jaw as Kageyama yawns into the back of his hand.

“Wait, wait, wait,” insists Yamaguchi. He stares upward the way he does when he collects his thoughts. Dutifully, they wait. Kageyama turns back to Yamaguchi as he goes on, “If you think she’s cute, then you must think I’m cute. And, oh _god_.” Yamaguchi turns on Kei and gawks. “If you think I’m cute, then you must think she’s cute!”

“I’m gay,” Kei responds, and the universe around him pulses because it’s the first time he’s said it aloud. He waits for some sort of repercussion: the breaking of a support beam overhead or a swift, torrential downpour, but nothing comes to pass. “Besides, you’re the one fawning over my older brother.”

“What?” blurts Kageyama.

Yamaguchi sighs and holds his hand up in defense.

“I said I wanted to marry him. One time. When I was ten. Do you still think about that?”

Kei does.

“She has a boyfriend,” Yamaguchi tells Kageyama, facing him once more.

“He looks like a cherub,” Kei supplies.

“He’s nice to her.”

“Cherubs have to be. Otherwise, they’re cast out of heaven.”

“You made that up just now.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. It doesn’t matter,” Kageyama dictates over them. “Can we get back to this?”

He pinches the volleyball roster. He and Yamaguchi zero in on the very first name. Kei stares at the faint characters through the paper, backlit by invasive sunbeams. It’s too far to make out names. The only lines left untouched are the ones that hold his name, Yamaguchi, Kageyama, and Hinata. Kei stares above and below the white spaces at proud, glaring streaks of yellow and bites his tongue.

Do any of them want to be captain? Would any of them rather drop the club altogether, saving time for homework and studying, friends and family, reading and writing, solitary silence? Do any of them hold onto routine for the sake of someone else? For their parents or their friends? For their brothers and sisters?

________________

  
The winter chill has successfully dissipated enough to uncover the lap pool. Kei’s father hauls the stiff vinyl rectangle across the lawn. He rests it against the house and it slouches and stills, leaning sluggishly on the wood. A single orb of light floats in the calm water. The other pool lights have burnt out. They left them on all winter.

When Kei’s father comes inside, Kei and Yamaguchi go out.

“Thirteen.”

“No. Higher, I mean.”

“Seventy?”

“Lower.”

“Forty. No, wait. Fifty.”

“Which one?”

“Fifty.”

“Higher.”

Yamaguchi kicks at the water. He wants to go in but Kei is content to let it lap at his shins. The scent of chlorine swings through with the wind. Next to him, Yamaguchi stirs small waves and they smack against the tile interior, the clear water proud and restless from its season of inactivity.

“Fifty-nine?” Yamaguchi guesses. He kicks at the water again in celebration when Kei nods, splashing wayward drops on Kei’s knee. Yamaguchi pulls his shirt sleeve over his hand and dabs them away. “We should go in. Then I could go home smelling like chlorine and all my siblings will be jealous.”

“It’s a lap pool. And it’s not even warm out,” says Kei.

Yamaguchi shrugs. “So?”

“You don't have a suit.”

“I’ll just go naked,” he insists, nudging Kei’s shoulder. “Huh, huh?”

“You’re not swimming naked in my family’s lap pool,” Kei tells him.

“But I could if it was just yours?”

Kei glances away from the sphere of light suspended in the crystal water. “What?”

“I could swim naked in the pool if it was just yours?”

“If you, for some reason, felt a burning need to do that, sure.”

Yamaguchi grins, pleased. He stretches his legs and taps his feet on the surface of the water. _Tap, tap, tap_ —the same way he used to splash when they were small and weren’t allowed by the pool at all, at least without Akiteru standing back by the fence or at the kitchen window, looking after them.

“All my needs are burning,” replies Yamaguchi.

“Sounds painful.”

His laugh cuts across the water and sprinkles among the grass that reclaims its spring pigment. 

“Remember when we weren’t allowed out here alone?” he asks, pushing his sleeves up to his elbows. “Because my parents thought I’d fall into the pool and die?”

Kei blinks at him. “I was just thinking about that.”

“Seriously?”

He nods. A breeze flows through the yard. It pushes Yamaguchi’s hair into his face and he lifts his hand to right it, dismissing dark strands behind his ear. Kei wants to drive his fingers through it but the action seems too big for the small moment. The toothpick house doesn’t have a pool, but the pond in its side yard boasts tiny water plants and goldfish—the most trivial alteration of all the colossal changes in store.

________________

  
“I need your help.”

“Uh, yeah, hello? Can you put my brother on, please?”

“I’m serious. I need you to teach me how to drive.”

“Oh.” There’s a crunch. Kei imagines Akiteru on his small couch, scooping twisted pretzels from their bag in handfuls the way he used to do at home. “Sounds kind of fun.”

Kei has never been to his brother’s apartment. He turned down every invitation until Akiteru stopped asking. But it’s been years. Kei is older now and he wouldn’t mind to go, and if nothing else, it would supply him with a firm blueprint of the place so he could more accurately estimate where Akiteru is when they talk on the phone. Akiteru sent him photos of his place last year but they didn’t help. Pictures always skew the truth—like the twenty-four-centimeter bronze statue photographed in his mother’s art book, glossy with deceit.

Years back, Akiteru told him he bought a plant. Kei imagined a wild tower of green, its leaves tumbling from twisted, tangled vines. He saw a small plastic watering can placed at its blue porcelain base. The enormous pot shined from the way Akiteru wiped it often with the rag he folded neatly beneath the can as to protect the hardwood from water stains. In Kei's mind, Akiteru watered it often. He even stopped every now and then to take the broadest leaf between his thumb and forefinger, assessing its rich hue and nodding when it looked greener than the day before.

Then he sent Kei a picture. It was a sad little thing, mashed into a small ceramic cup. Kei could hold it in his hand. It drooped over itself on the sill, depressed with envy of the trees outside the window where Akiteru set it. There was no nearby watering can, no threat of water stains. The green tower in Kei’s mind toppled. Why had he expected so much?

“It won’t be,” Kei replies.

“But necessary,” his brother tells him.

“Yeah.”

“Do you have your provisional?” he asks.

“I’ve had it for months. Since before my birthday.”

“Kei, seriously? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Kei swivels in his desk chair. “I don’t know.”

“You could’ve had your license by now.”

“I know,” he huffs. Regret hollows out a pit in his stomach.

“Okay, okay. Yeah, I’ll teach you. I think I can come next weekend. Okay?”

“Thanks.”

“Kei?”

Kei stops swiveling. “What?”

“Did, uh,” starts Akiteru, “did Dad tell you no? Or Mom?”

Kei pulls the phone away from his ear. The television in the living room wails. The racket of a made-for-TV movie slips down the hall and beneath the crack of his bedroom door. His mother was asleep on the couch when he got home, electric blues and yellows flickering over her lax face. Kei puts the phone to his ear.

“I didn’t ask them.”

Akiteru takes a moment. Kei stares hard at his desktop.

“Oh,” Akiteru responds. “Oh. Okay, yeah.”

Kei sees his brother sit up on his small couch, phone pressed to his ear. He sees him grin.

________________

  
Yamaguchi’s knees sink into the mattress. The creaking dip is the reason Kei stirs, brushing off the sticky cobwebs of sleep until he’s able to detach his dream from reality; a dream he forgets the instant he wakes up. Yamaguchi crawls to the far side of the bed. It creaks beneath him, the way it did when Kei stroked him, hot and slick, quick and careful, up and down, up and down, up and down. A mass of solid warmth hoists from his stomach up into his chest.

Yamaguchi blinks at him, his cheek pressed flat to the mattress. Kei took the pillow that belongs there. He slips his arm from the warm shell of his comforter and shimmies the pillow out from beneath his own. Yamaguchi lifts his head so Kei can slide it into place, and there’s a soft sound as it compresses under Yamaguchi’s head.

“You were napping,” Yamaguchi points out, grinning.

Kei’s hum rumbles in his throat. Yamaguchi shifts a little closer. He smells like Shimada Mart, like cardboard and bleach. The clean, familiar scent cuts through the room.

“Your dad was pacing when I came in, I think,” he says. Again, Kei hums. He gives attention to the cluster of freckles below Yamaguchi’s eye—just five or six pigmented pinpricks that beam through a smattering of fainter flecks. “He wanted to drive me home later, but I told him I was staying.”

“Good.”

“Do I look blurry right now?”

“Sort of,” Kei tells him.

He inches closer and his weight tugs at Kei’s comforter. “Now?”

“You’re close, so not really.”

“When I’m super close, can you see me clearly?”

“Not clearly. But better.”

“Want your glasses?” asks Yamaguchi, and he shifts like he plans to get them.

“No.”

“Good. I didn’t want to get them for you anyway.”

Kei grins. Yamaguchi’s own grin breaks into a beam and it shows off the smallest gap just before his left canine; a separation Kei sometimes tongues at when they kiss. He becomes aware of his breathing, suddenly, and closes his mouth on the soft rhythm. He didn’t realize it parted.

Yamaguchi lifts himself onto his elbow and moves over Kei like he plans to reach for the nightstand, but halts and presses his mouth to Kei’s ear instead. The foreign touch pricks Kei’s skin. His shoulders hunch. His mouth parts again because Yamaguchi’s breath is hot on the shell of his ear, the gentle cadence pooling in his eardrum. Kei’s sigh explodes in the room. Yamaguchi presses a soft kiss to the top of his ear, his earlobe, and relents to trail down the side of Kei’s face. Kei blinks as he kisses the corner of his eye. His breath hitches as he kisses his cheek. He shifts in his blankets as Yamaguchi leaves a trio of light, easy kisses down his jaw.

He lies back. His face glows red. Closer now, he shares Kei’s pillow.

“What’s wrong with your dad?” he wonders.

“Nothing. Everything.”

“Tsuru and Hana fought last night.” Yamaguchi tugs at the edge of the pillowcase. “Don’t ask why because I don’t know.”

Kei pushes the blankets to his waist. He rests his fingers on Yamaguchi’s and Yamaguchi stops tugging.

“I’m sorry,” Kei tells him. 

He shakes his head. “She’s been really on edge lately. Even Dad said so.”

“Tsuru? Or your stepmom?”

“Tsuru is always on edge,” Yamaguchi huffs. “My stepmom.”

Kei pets his fingers and looks away. Did they keep Yamaguchi up through the night? Did they wake his brothers and sister? Did his father involve himself? Did they scream and slam doors so hard that it shook the walls around them? Did photographs dangle and drop to the floor below, their glass frames cracking into thousands of vicious pieces? Or was their fury hushed, subdued? Did Yamaguchi only hear by chance, an instance of terrible timing? When did it end? How? Did Yamaguchi lie awake until that moment, feeling heavy enough to break his bed frame, watching the ceiling the way Kei does? 

Kei doesn’t ask.

“You didn’t text me about it,” he notes instead.

“I didn’t know until this morning. Tsuru mentioned it.”

“Are they alright?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Yamaguchi finds his hand. Tenderly, he twists their fingers together. Kei rubs his thumb across the heel of Yamaguchi’s palm and Yamaguchi closes his other hand around Kei’s, too, sighing as he smoothes his thumb over Kei’s wrist. Their connection breathes and pulses. If he took his hand away, he would see what links them: thick, throbbing, electric lines, blue and red and pink, harmless as they click and spark between soft wrists.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei mumbles, “do you want your license?”

Yamaguchi’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He ignores it and turns onto his back.

“Not really,” he answers. The bed shifts as he toes off his shoes. They hit the carpet with dull thuds and Kei tugs his hand tighter just to feel him tug back. When he lets out a breath, Yamaguchi sinks further into the mattress. “I’m not exactly eager. After Mom, I mean. And I don’t really need it, especially if you get yours, you know?”

Kei nods. “Akiteru said he would help me.”

“When?”

“Next weekend, he said.”

“Seriously?” Yamaguchi sits up. “That soon?”

His phone vibrates again and this time, he silences it. It bounces when he drops it onto the bed. 

Kei sits up, too. He shrugs. “I don’t know. I want to be able to go if I have to. Or want to, I guess. Dad says always be prepared.” Kei stares hard at the tiny peach sticker on the back of Yamaguchi’s phone. He stuck it there last year and Yamaguchi never peeled it off. He finishes, “Even if it’s his mistakes I have to prepare for. I guess I want the option to leave. It’s not like I would always need it. Just in case—in case of my parents, and—I don’t know.”

Trapped under the weight of Yamaguchi’s gaze, Kei can’t lift his own.

“What about my house?” Yamaguchi implores.

“What?”

“You know you can always, always come to my house. Like, always, Tsukki. You know that. No matter what,” he insists, his promise unwavering. He touches Kei’s knee for a moment. Then he brings his hand back to himself and lilts, “It’s just an exact twenty-three-minute walk from the toothpick house, you know.”

Kei grins weakly. He does have Yamaguchi’s house. But what if one day he doesn’t?

Distant situations, all nasty and irreconcilable and a myriad of relocations swirl so quickly through Kei’s mind that he can’t pinpoint a single one so he just lets the hurricane dizzy him, lets it spin violently until he’s bruised and sick, lets it prod and pester him until he’s numb and tingling. He recaptures his senses when Yamaguchi leans in and kisses him on the mouth. It’s over before Kei realizes and he’s left with just the warmth of it, and the pleasant, pulsing weight that Yamaguchi’s generous, unbridled, _overflowing_ affection forever leaves in its wake.

“One thing, though,” he adds, jabbing Kei square in the chest.

Their foreheads press together. Kei tilts his head so their noses bump.

“What?” he whispers.

“If you find yourself driving off,” Yamaguchi declares, “I better be in that fucking passenger seat.”


	17. the record player, pt. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "It was odd. My brother had been part of a family of three, and now I was part of a family of three. We'd never been a family of four, not for long. And even though he and I shared the same parents, they were not the same _people_ by the time I was born. My brother and I were truly raised in two different families, by two different sets of parents."
> 
> \- a wolf at the table / augusten burroughs

Music trudges upstairs. It crawls down the hallway with heavy, plodding steps and rubs against Kei’s door like a cat, loud and needy. Kei wakes up and falls back asleep to it so many times that he shoves the small memories into dreams. The melodic, persistent drone hums through his bedroom walls, stuffing hooks and riffs under Kei’s door.

Kei’s senses are slow to start. He shifts in the warm coil of blankets and the spring sunshine beams over the bed, bending where the white sheets pucker and fold. Kei lets out a patient breath. The music plays on. Yamaguchi is half-hard because Kei slept with his thigh against his groin.

There are not enough mornings where they wake up to nothing. They wake up to the trill of alarm clocks; to Akiteru and company; to sourceless music; to Yamaguchi’s frenzied siblings, slapping at his bedroom door with small, frantic hands. What would it be like to wake up to the absence of such things? Kei could wake up to the light, innocent cadence of Yamaguchi’s breathing. He could count to it. In for four, out for six. He could wake up to Yamaguchi’s mouth warm on his neck. They could take their time. They could kiss each other awake, slowly, thoroughly. 

But noise tears the opportunity clean open. Kei sits up. He grinds his palms into his eyes.

“Are you okay?” wonders Yamaguchi, eyes closed.

“Listen,” says Kei.

Yamaguchi blinks awake. He stares at the ceiling in concentration.

“The record player,” he says after a moment.

“Yeah.”

Kei traces the bumps and valleys Yamaguchi creates under the blanket: the knobs of his knees, the bump where he rests his hands on his stomach, the valley where the sheets dip between his legs. He stares for a while like maybe the record will quiet if he just remains here, languid on his mattress. It doesn’t. It maybe even cranks louder, rapping at his door with a slow, dragging fist. He replaces his glasses. His tight joints crack when he gets up and Yamaguchi snickers.

“Are you ninety-nine years old?”

“Yes. I’ll be right back.”

Kei closes the door behind him. The low, thick hum pulls him down the stairs. The house acquires a draft; the front door is ajar, Kei sees it from the end of the hall, and the same spirited wind that pushed dry branches into his bedroom window all night now slips through the crack. Do the neighbors hear the music, too? Do they shuffle stiffly past, tugging at the leashes of dogs with pricked ears, their wet noses pointed toward the pitiful house as it moans?

At the mouth of the hallway, Kei stops. Huge, black spiders litter the living room floor like debris. They eclipse the cream carpet, hordes of them, clusters of deep black spanning the floor. But they don’t move. They reflect warped light from nearby windows. Not spiders—vinyl. Hard, jagged pieces of vinyl. A mosaic of an entire century of music, of history and change, splattered darkly across the living room floor. Sorrow forces Kei’s heart into his stomach.

The house reeks of betrayal. He smells it now, rancid and festering. It spoils the milk in the fridge. It rots the fruits in the pantry. Around him, the air adjusts. From pre-storm static to post-storm humidity, it alters. Dew congeals on Kei’s skin. He turns to the only bit of life in the dead room, just a spark, an orange flicker that he and his father suffocated under a glass dome for so, so long.

Kei’s mother sits on the couch, alone.

The tune that had fallen to background noise returns with vengeance, blaring in his ears. He steps closer to its source. His mother doesn’t make a dent in the couch. Gingerly, Kei sits too, and the bare shelf on the wall pulls his attention. The player holds the sole record that remains. It croons sharply, desperately and regretfully, screeching a swan song for the others now lost. Kei blinks at the pieces. His mother won’t face him.

His heart cracks in two—a physical, audible break.

“I didn’t want to be in the middle of it,” he manages.

Kei’s mother turns his way. Her head tips to the side in a daze, swallowed by the sound.

“What?”

“I didn’t want to be in the middle of it,” Kei tells her again, louder now.

She nods, not hearing him. Kei swears. He pushes off the couch and lifts the needle from the spinning record. The absence of sound is staggering and Kei’s ears keep the persistent drone, humming inside his head like it’s been there all along, suddenly shoved to the forefront to torment him. The speakers crackle. His mother breaks through the white noise.

“Hand me it.”

Kei does. He takes in a breath when he touches it, floored when it doesn’t sear his skin like the porcelain cube. The creation remains in the basement despite his mother’s intention to bring it up. The memory glitches. It plants itself in Kei’s head as just yesterday and a decade into the future all at once, and Kei realizes that he never expected this day to come; when his father would disclose his shit plans and disrupt every single timeline, twisting them all together and ripping them apart in an instant. Kei sets the record in his mother’s splayed hands. He takes his place on the couch beside her. A breeze squeezes its way into the house and the front door creaks open further.

A final time, Kei warbles, “I didn’t want to be in the middle of any of it.”

Hot tears prick his eyes. He blinks and blinks and blinks and they recede.

There’s a hearty crack as his mother bends the edge of the record between her fingers. She drops the chipped piece to the floor. Kei immediately can’t distinguish it from the rest. She snaps off piece after piece after piece and they sprinkle over the carpet, making soft plastic sounds as they hit the bed of jagged black. Why hadn’t she broken it in two—the grandest breakage possible, ripping the worn sticker in the record’s center and cracking the grooved plate into sharp, twin pieces?

They drown in silence. They gasp in lungfuls of black water, submerged in tragedy in the house Kei leaves behind. It’s the only thing Kei can think to say to her, to ask her over the sound of splitting: does she still love him? Water rises. His body sinks. It’s the heaviest question Kei has ever held on his tongue, and he’s terrified—not of a quick, knee-jerk response, but of the single, dying moment that occupies the hesitation before one.

Silence traps him and he wriggles in its grasping hands. Crooked pieces hit the carpet.

________________

  
Kei spends two nights at Yamaguchi’s before Akiteru comes. Yamaguchi is gentle with him. He’s quiet and unimposing, his touches few and light like the bruises inside Kei have started to manifest on his skin. Yamaguchi’s fingertips flit over black and blue and purple. Kei whispers things that turn him pink.

Akiteru isn’t in the house for fifteen minutes before Kei tells him all. His mother offered no choice in the matter if Kei wanted one; broken records litter the living room floor still, two sparse trails carved into the clutter that lead to the kitchen and the adjacent hallway. The pieces shift and whisper when Akiteru drops his bag. His soft, careful eyes break the dam in an instant with the same grueling force as a sledgehammer and admissions gush from Kei like violent blue water: the toothpick house, The Professional, the crumpled letters, the vinyl spiders, the busted light bulb and the clay cup on the bedroom mantle, Kei’s guilt and his shame, all spilling from him in huge, warbling waves. Akiteru’s face stays placid; a flat sheet of water just before a shark fin slices it in two.

They sit on the couch with his hand on Kei’s back. Akiteru asks him things but Kei can’t look him the eye any longer so he thumbs through the four texts he’s received from their father since he tore their mother clean in two. He reminded Kei to tape the bottom flaps of the boxes he doesn't yet have after constructing and before packing anything inside. He asked him to replace the pool cover. He told him that he’s crossing T’s on final stacks of paperwork and scheduling moving trucks.

He said he’s excited to start over. Kei has no idea what it means, so he doesn’t reply.

He and Akiteru spend an hour on their hands and knees plucking sharp vinyl pieces from the living room carpet. When they’re done, Akiteru vacuums. It’s unnecessary but it makes Kei feel better anyway, like the carpet looks better now than it did to begin with, and like maybe there was never anything to clean at all.

“What happened there?” Akiteru asks.

Kei blinks at the chili oil stain on the carpet that, in four weeks, he learned to look past.

“I don’t know,” he answers. 

Akiteru cleans it, too. He scrubs and scrubs and scrubs and Kei sprays when he asks him to. He tells his brother about the tick-tick-tick of the stove, the stench of gasoline, the desert landscape and how, knocked inexplicably loose, the corner of its shiny gold frame dug mercilessly into the back of the couch.

“I always liked the little cactus flower,” says Akiteru.

The quietest grin breaks over Kei’s lips. He tucks away the spray bottle under the kitchen sink and it’s an effort to stand back up. The acrid, chemical smell holds him down. In a matter of minutes, the house has gone dark. The sun vanished behind the hills somewhere between vacuuming and scrubbing. Akiteru clicks on a lamp in the living room and yellow light spills over the carpet and all the way to the kitchen, turning pristine marble floors golden. 

“Kei, I’ll be right back.”

He lifts his backpack over his shoulder. At the mouth of the hallway, Kei stops him.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

Akiteru shrugs. The zipper of his bag clinks against its metal track. “Putting my stuff in my room. I figured I would stay there this time. My old room, I mean. The guest room,” he corrects, and Kei’s heart cracks a little further. “Since Dad’s not here.” He shrugs again. “I don’t know.”

Kei nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

“We can start driving tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

They both pause at the brief rumble out front. The next moment carries their mother through the front door on a breeze, her presence small but loud, pressing Kei’s heart to the very back of his chest. She closes the door behind her with a delicate hand. She holds her phone to her ear.

Her voice is diverse—high then low, hushed then exaggerated, harsh then soft—as she crosses the room between Kei and Akiteru, her steps swift on the clean carpet. When she makes it to the kitchen, her shoes click on the marble. Their parents’ bedroom door creaks open but never slams shut. Kei stares straight ahead, waiting for the boom. It doesn’t come. A second creak and their mother resurfaces, her arms brimming with books.

“Mom,” croaks Akiteru.

The mass of half a dozen thick, dusty art books weigh her down. Her steps are slower now. She trudges through the kitchen and living room once more and doesn’t ask her sons for help as she slips through the door, back into the dark purple evening. Kei comes to the doorway.

“Mom?” he calls after her.

He feels Akiteru behind him, watching too as their mother backs out of the driveway.

________________

  
“Are you sleeping?”

“I called you. How could I be asleep?”

“Sleep calling,” Yamaguchi suggests. His voice dips as he stifles a yawn.

Kei drags his finger over the top shelf of his desk, collecting dust.

“That’s not a real thing,” he says.

“Sleep calling is a real thing, Tsukki. Look it up.”

“Okay, well. I’m not doing it.”

“I believe you.”

“Thanks.”

Kei rubs the dust he’s gathered between his thumb and forefinger. It sprinkles onto his desktop in a tiny pile of gray. Yamaguchi shifts around, the receiver of his phone catching on fabric or skin, rustling into the quiet stillness of Kei’s room. Kei takes him off speakerphone. He presses Yamaguchi’s soft noise directly to his ear. 

“I used to have these dreams when I was little,” he begins, “where I would spend hours and hours getting ready for something. Some event, or a party. A wedding. Anything really, but I can’t remember them specifically.” He swipes his finger through another sheet of dust. This time, the one that covers the thin box at the corner of his desk—the one that houses his birthday money, still untouched. “It would take me forever, Yamaguchi.” Kei sprinkles the new dust into another small hill. “But I just kept needing to do more. Get dressed. Call someone. Find something I thought I needed. My parents would stand at the front door and scream at me to hurry up. It wasn’t always my parents, though. Sometimes it was my brother. Once, it was my grandparents.”

The rustling on Yamaguchi’s end stopped. He’s still now and so silent, waiting.

“Yeah?” he breathes.

“Yeah. And I never went to the event, ever. I never got to go to the party or the game or the show or the movie or the goddamn wedding. I always woke up before I left. I spent hours readying myself. It felt like days, sometimes,” Kei tells him, rubbing his dirty fingers on his jeans. “But I never actually went, and nothing ever happened.”

“Not even once?” asks Yamaguchi.

“No,” Kei answers.

He puts him on speakerphone again. He rests his phone on his desk, face up. His elbows dig into the wood and he props his head on his fingertips. Speakerphone static crackles noisily but Kei doesn’t turn it off because what the fuck does it matter if Akiteru hears him from across the hall? Shouldn’t he know, too? 

“That’s how I thought this all would go. The toothpick house, my dad’s affair. All this disruption.”

Yamaguchi’s breath hitches. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I thought I would spend all this time preparing for the outcome of these things. But in the end, they would never, ever come to pass. I thought about how Mom would react and predicted one thousand versions of the first thing she’d say to me—the first thing she’d say to _Dad_ —one million times when she found out, how scathed she’d be and how alone we would leave her, how alone my dad would feel even in the toothpick house with me just because of the way I am, but—I never thought these things would ever actually, _actually_ happen. These things are too cruel to actually happen. Right?”

Moments crawl by. Yamaguchi’s sigh is heavy, watery.

“No,” he replies, and he’s right. “But I think the way we deal with them can make them less so.”

Kei closes his eyes.

“Tell me how to deal with this,” he mumbles.

“Kei,” Yamaguchi whines, his voice watery again, “Kei, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Wrinkles of change iron out over time,” he promises. His tone softens. “Dad used to tell me that when I was real little, when Hana moved in. And then again and again and again when my siblings were born. It made me miserable back then, but now I can’t think about growing up without them.”

Kei sweeps dust piles from his desktop and grins down at the clean surface.

“Probably would have been quieter.”

Yamaguchi huffs a laugh. “Boring.”

“Yamaguchi,” Kei mutters.

Kei wants to tell him. He wants to unlock every door and pull him through. He needs to whisper what Yamaguchi means to him, wholly, absolutely. He needs to tell him what he feels when he sees his name, pixelated on a screen or scribbled in the corner of lined notebook paper. He longs to tell him of his devotion, of his certainty and his desire. He wants Yamaguchi to know his bright, shining effect and how it spills into Kei’s dimmest, sharpest corners. He wants to handle Yamaguchi’s grace in the most literal way: to cup it in his palms, warm and pulsing with life, leaking between Kei’s fingers and splashing like liquid gold onto the floor below. He wants to hold the cold, coppery parts, too. He wants to grasp Yamaguchi’s lack of self-worth, his cowardice, and untidiness. They aren’t gold but they are _his_ , and that alone makes Kei long for them just the same.

Kei slips his fingers under his glasses. He rubs at his sore eyes.

“Thanks for everything,” he murmurs finally.

The weak words tumble out in an honest confession’s stead. Yamaguchi doesn’t notice. He hums into the receiver and Kei presses his phone to his ear just in time to hear it, clear and steady. His sweet tone melts in Kei’s ear. It smothers the last dredges of his uncertainty. The eternal knot in Kei’s stomach tugs loose, if only a little.

“Anything for you,” says Yamaguchi, and the promise tapers off with a yawn.

________________

  
Kei stays on the line until Yamaguchi falls asleep.

Kei’s heart beats loud and he leaves his bedroom like it might wake him up. The moon shines against the back of the house, the front hallway a familiar pitch black in moonlight’s absence. Kei skims his fingers over the wall as he goes to the living room. He can’t navigate the toothpick house in darkness like this. The angles will be different. Sound will bounce in other directions and staircases will rise steeper. The wallpaper will drag more smoothly beneath his fingertips.

Under his feet, the kitchen marble is cool. Does hardwood freeze like this?

“Kei? Are you alright?” Akiteru asks blearily, and Kei jumps out of his skin. “Oops, sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

He splays his hands on the kitchen counter and stares into the living room, cast in shadow. His brother’s phone brightens on the floor near the couch. Akiteru’s arm hangs over the cushion and the white light beams into his palm. He doesn’t move to check it.

“What are you doing in here?” Kei wonders.

“I don’t know. I tried to sleep in my old room like I told you. But it was weird. I couldn’t fall asleep.”

He leaves the chill of the kitchen to sit cross-legged in front of the couch. Even through the back window, the dim moonlight does the room little justice. Kei pushes his glasses into his hair. He blinks at the dark shape of his brother and yards or maybe miles away, the refrigerator hums.

“Remember the dog we had for a week?” he wonders.

Akiteru hums. “Yeah. Taro. I think it was less than a week, though.”

“We bathed him once.”

“In Mom and Dad’s bathtub, yeah,” he finishes, peeling back a thin film of fatigue. “But he jumped out and ran all over the room, rolling around on their bed and stuff. Then a few days later, Dad decided he was allergic to him. I remember that.”

“Allergies,” Kei repeats vehemently.

“I know.”

“We would still have that dog if we kept him."

“Yeah, we would. But I don’t think we were really a dog family, anyway.”

“Yeah,” says Kei, poking his fingers into the downy carpet.

“It was fun while it lasted.”

“You should get a plant,” he tells Akiteru.

Akiteru’s phone lights up again. He reaches down and flips it over, banning the only artificial light in the room. Kei eyes the bright white perimeter on the carpet until it goes dark. 

“I have a plant,” Akiteru insists. “It’s on the desk in my apartment.”

“No. A real plant. Nothing in a small plastic cup. A real, towering plant that you have to water every day.”

“Why would I do that?”

Maybe Kei will get one for him, just like the wild green tower he imagined years back. Akiteru will thank him and put it in his kitchen. Maybe in his living room. He will keep it in a nice ceramic pot. Maybe their mother would make one for him and he can pick the color. He will buy a watering can to match. Akiteru will put a clean rag beneath the pot’s ceramic home to avoid water stains and Kei will ensure he keeps it alive because he will text him every day and then he will check himself because Kei plans to visit often after he graduates, mainly because he cannot think of himself doing much of anything else when school and club and studies are torn away from him. Yamaguchi will visit, too. They’ll sleep together on Akiteru’s couch. 

His brother’s couch won’t be comfortable like the one he occupies now. It’s small. He and Yamaguchi will have to curl up. They’ll have to minimize, the way they did during games of hide-and-seek when they were kids; beneath the deck in the backyard, between the flower bushes that lined the front walkway, behind rows of hanging clothes in Akiteru’s bedroom closet, inhaling the fresh scent of fabric and soap.

“Why couldn’t you fall asleep in there?” Kei mumbles into the dark room. “In your bedroom?”

Soft material shifts together as Akiteru turns onto his side.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles back. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“Okay.”

Kei waits. The fridge hums harder in the silence. He draws shapes in the living room carpet until Akiteru comes up with it.

“Okay,” he says again. “I don’t know, it’s like—I can still see you in there, sitting on my bed while I told you stories about school, about volleyball, and you would cheer and make me tell more.” Here, he grins. Kei spies his whites of his teeth. “Or I’ll think about you and Tadashi bringing me your toys, waving them around and stuff, telling me what you did that day while I was gone. I don’t know. Stuff like that.”

At his words, Kei grows impossibly fragile. He hugs his arms over his chest.

“And it’s just—we aren’t like that anymore, you know? I was at college and I couldn’t keep up with your changing. Your growth, I guess. But it’s weird to come back to something new in someplace familiar,” Akiteru admits, his words slow and thoughtful. “I think that feeling never really left. It’s just locked up in my old room, hanging around forever.”

Kei’s hands fall into his lap. He stares hatefully at them, his head shaking—not because he doesn’t understand, he _does_ , and he recalls each childish moment inside Akiteru’s room but through a rusted, twitching filter like it’s another, former life—but because of the utter unfairness of it all. What happened that catapulted him and his brother so far into the past? What then locked them there, in the prototype that would become their parents rusted cage? The ghost of what used to be holds Kei back in every instance he tries to fight forward. It mangles his roots every time he tries to grow. A lack of sunlight leaves him swollen on the dirt. Like Akiteru’s, Kei’s branches dig steadfastly into the past, but each shift in an attempt to break free has him reeling, shattering.

What if they were to embrace the shift?

They could face each change with grace the way Yamaguchi has, and meet each subtraction with an addition, multiplying their strengths, dividing their burdens. Kei will learn to walk expertly through the toothpick house in pure darkness. He will ignore his bruises when he crashes into walls and corners until he knows where they erect and swerves to miss them. He will yank his brother behind him when his roots stick fast to the dirt. Kei will pull his attention forward when he catches him glancing over his shoulder.

There isn’t anything to gain from looking back.


	18. 10 boxes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a heads up, the total chapter number is completely false rn but i have no idea what to change it to. 25 maybe?
> 
> thank you guys for sticking with me! i love love love ya! <3

“Sweetheart.”

“No.”

“Cookie?” Yamaguchi guesses.

“Definitely not.”

“Then what?”

"Do not give me a pet name. It’s gross. Stop trying.”

“No, wait. What about honey?”

“I’m not sweet. Or sticky.”

“You are sweet. It’s cute, Tsukki, come on.”

“Absolutely not.”

Yamaguchi kicks at the tile with the heel of his sneaker, lost in thought. 

“Baby,” he offers.

Kei shifts and the stepladder creaks beneath him. His eyes find a beer bottle cap, lodged unceremoniously under the lip of the bottom shelf. It’s bent at an angle from the opener it had been pried off with. How did it get there? Who refused to wait the ninety seconds it takes the purchase the bottle and simply step outside?

Yamaguchi doubles over to watch Kei’s face, his own brightening.

“Oh my god,” he chirps. “You like that, huh?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, baby,” he quips.

Kei pulls the knot of his apron undone. Yamaguchi clicks his tongue and refastens it. The same way the short, sparse pet supply aisle boasts the stench of squeaky rubber and kitty litter, the cleaning supply aisle of Shimada Mart reeks of chemicals. The sweet and acrid smells intertwine so potently that Kei can’t identify a single one. The smell of bleach, maybe. But only because it’s acutely familiar.

“You should get an apron, too,” Yamaguchi tells him. “So you can blend right in.”

“I’m sure Shimada-san would love that.”

“I’ll bring it up to him.”

“Do not.”

Yamaguchi pulls bristly scrub brushes from the cardboard box at his feet and hangs them on the wall of pegs. Each one sways before it settles. Next to his hip perches a two-pack of steel wool pads. Kei reaches and turns them around, the thin plastic crinkling between his fingers. The bar code on the back glares at him. Kei looks away.

“I should’ve worked during high school,” he says, staring at the new knot of Yamaguchi’s apron.

Yamaguchi turns over his shoulder. “What?”

“I should’ve worked. I should’ve had a job, like you.”

“Why?” he asks. “It’s not like your family needs the help. That’s why I started, remember? And then Dad moved up at the site, and I just didn’t want to quit.” He shrugs and hangs another brush. He hangs this one with care, like the shop lives and breathes around him, flinching with each ounce of weight he adds to its shelves. “I still don’t.”

The shop’s bell chimes up front. Kei makes himself smaller on the stepladder.

“You don’t have to,” he replies.

“I will soon. It’ll have me so messed up, Tsukki.”

“Why?”

“Because,” huffs Yamaguchi, “it’s like, a quarter of what I do. I go to school, I go to practice, I go out with you, and I go to work. Those are the four elements of Tadashi. Half of those disappear in a couple weeks with graduation, and then what?”

Kei frowns. “No. You have endless elements.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he answers, nodding at Yamaguchi’s back. “I do.”

“So, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you think you should’ve gotten a job?”

Two women appear at the end of the aisle and greet Yamaguchi, waving with wrinkled hands—customers that know him, their faces familiar to even Kei in the last three years—and Yamaguchi’s smile in return is warm and so, so genuine. A second, joyous chime rings through the shop as they leave.

When the bell stills, Kei rips his gaze from the floor. Even if he had gotten a part-time job like Yamaguchi, it would not be like his. It would be miles away from his. Kei would never find the familiarity and security Yamaguchi finds at Shimada Mart; behind counters, between shelves, beneath fluorescent lights, and atop checkered tile. Kei would not recognize customers and patrons. He couldn’t pick faces out of the many as they wavered in front of his own. He would complete his textbook tasks and leave. And when he left, no one would notice.

“There are plenty of reasons,” he mumbles.

Kneeling on the floor, Yamaguchi pries open another cardboard box on the dolly. 

“Like what?”

“I would’ve had something to occupy my time. I would have money from saving it up over the years, the same way you do. I would’ve gotten to think critically about something that isn’t school or volleyball, neither of which satisfy me. I would have something to put on a resume.”

Yamaguchi puts down the soap dispensers he’d pulled from the box. One tips over and topples the rest of them, and Yamaguchi stares at them for a moment, unimpressed, before he turns to Kei. He rests his hand on his shoulder and squeezes.

“It’s alright,” he tells him, “tons of kids don’t work in high school.”

His hand falls back to his side. Kei shakes his head.

“I can list all of those reasons. But the only one that matters is that I wouldn’t have been in my house,” he mumbles, staring hard at a scuff mark between Yamaguchi’s feet. “I wouldn’t have flinched at every explosion from the living room. I wouldn't have cut my heels on shards of broken glass on the way to the kitchen.” His glance strays. Same as the floor, there’s a black scuff mark on the toe of Yamaguchi’s sneaker. The knot in its laces is identical to the one in his apron strings. “I wouldn’t know how high waves in the lap pool rise when you throw a television into it, or the clanking sound the garbage disposal makes as its blades slice against wedding rings. If I were gone,” Kei voices, “I wouldn’t know those things.”

“You _shouldn’t_ know those things,” counters Yamaguchi.

His voice is firm. It contradicts the tenderness in his stare. He abandons the soap bottles yet again and takes one of Kei’s hands between both of his, his tawny fingers wrapping securely around it. Yamaguchi stands so close that the toes of their shoes touch. He holds Kei’s hand so his knuckles brush his stomach. The cheap fabric of Yamaguchi’s apron is only rough when paired with his smooth, heavy palm and his warm, wide fingers.

________________

  
The heat of the sun barely registers on Kei’s back as he sits on the grass, folded over himself. Kageyama stretches dutifully across from him. He presses his forehead to his knee and counts but Kei lets his muscles lock and tighten, straining when he so much as leans back on his hands. He curls his fingers into his palms. He rakes dirt under his nails.

“We won’t end up in the same place,” says Kageyama.

He sits up now, his sharp eyes narrowed across the field. They soften as they skim Hinata. Wind shakes through the long grass and Kei follows his stare. He doesn’t make it that far; Yamaguchi looks good, standing idle under a tree in pre-bloom, his kneepads pushed around his ankles, making his legs look impossibly long. Pride leaps in Kei’s stomach.

“What?” he asks, glancing up.

“After we graduate—me and Hinata.”

Kageyama’s words drip with certainty. He is steadfast and sure. Kei eyes his shoelaces and is only sure that he has never felt so certain about anything in his life, except maybe Yamaguchi. But loving Yamaguchi or telling him so makes him nervous, like going to sleep without knowing the exact moment he’ll wake up. Time and other external things are easy to mediate. Kei’s sentiment and intuition are not.

He looks away. “And you’re okay with that?”

“I’ll always have the chance to play against him.”

“Wouldn’t you rather play with him?”

“Just because we’ll go to different schools doesn’t mean we won’t see each other,” says Kageyama, leaning back on his hands, too. He pulls a blade of grass from the earth and rolls it between his thumb and forefinger. He watches it spin. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Yes it is,” Kei argues.

Tension twists in his stomach. It will take hours to untangle. Kageyama shrugs. On the opposite end of the field, Yamaguchi points to Hinata’s shoes and Hinata swiftly ducks to tie them. The splitting of something so concrete—Hinata and Kageyama, Kei’s mother and his father—what splits them more effortlessly than distance? Two separate gyms, two separate fields, two separate schools and two separate houses, two separate schedules and two separate minds. The myriad of options is daunting. Kei glares at the possibilities and waits for the certain separation that will split him and Yamaguchi to glare back. Nothing does.

“You act like graduation is the end of the world. It’s not.”

Kei chews the inside of his cheek. He splits the slippery skin and winces.

“It’s the end of something.”

“Yeah, huh,” Kageyama replies loftily, “homework and small, shitty desks.”

“That doesn’t end in college. I hate to break it to you.”

“Whatever. You know what I mean.”

“It’s still the end of something,” Kei repeats.

“Just if you want it to be,” Kageyama fires back.

________________

  
Akiteru doesn’t let Kei drive at first. He makes him watch. Akiteru takes them down long, dirt roads behind their neighborhood that Kei has never seen. He pictures his brother years younger, his license fresh and new, driving the same narrow roads and embracing his freedom in the form of metal and glass and filthy, screeching rubber.

Kei already can’t leave the radio alone. Akiteru swats him away every time.

“Focus on my hands,” he tells him. “See where they are on the wheel?”

“Ah, yes. Your tiny little hands.”

“They are not tiny.”

“Tinier than mine.”

“Because yours are humungous.”

Kei turns away and flushes because Yamaguchi said the same thing the other day, but while Kei’s hand was around his dick. He tries to roll the window down but Akiteru has them locked. He stares at the countryside through a weird, transparent smudge on the bottom corner of the glass.

“Like some kind of human-monster hybrid,” his brother goes on. “Like Bigfoot, but with hands.”

“Bighand,” Kei supplies.

“Yeah, exactly. Are you still watching?”

They drive until morning rolls into afternoon; until Kei is confident he can do the same without wrapping the car around a telephone pole. The ticking of the engine when Akiteru turns the key is a lullaby. Faint and familiar, it keeps Kei in the passenger seat until his brother slams the driver side door shut. Kei trails him into the house. Empty of anyone but the two of them, it feels inviting for the first time—despite the lingering ghosts of vinyl pieces, oil stains, cracked porcelain and each and every vow promised decades back.

Despite the lack of their father’s record player, gone from its perch at the back wall. They stare from the center of the living room for a minute, assessing. But it’s the only thing absent. In fact, there’s an addition: their father’s jacket is slung over the arm of the couch, forgotten. He must have left without it. Akiteru goes to the back table and fusses over the empty space.

Kei takes the seam of their father’s jacket between his fingers, lifting it. It’s warm enough now; the coat should be stored in a closet and abandoned until next fall, wedged between scarves and down-filled vests. Kei pictures the blueprint of the toothpick house. Two closets downstairs, four upstairs; one in each bedroom, one in the hall. His father will probably keep the jacket in the downstairs closet near the front door, just like he did here. Maybe he’ll keep it in his bedroom closet instead. Kei turns and drops the jacket on the hook by the front door.

From its pocket falls a key. Brass and rusty, it winks up at Kei. It fits snug in his palm when he picks it up and Akiteru turns around to stare, too. Kei tilts his hand, flipping the trinket. He eyes the tiny, oblong orb reflected in its dull brass. It glints like the birdbath key.

“What’s that?” Akiteru asks.

“Nothing.”

Kei drops it back in the pocket it fell from. Akiteru sighs.

“Dad only took the record player. Isn’t that weird, Kei?”

“Before Mom could break it, too. That was probably his reasoning.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“How difficult do you think it is,” wonders Kei, “to divide objects between two people who have owned them together for so long?”

Akiteru sits heavily on the couch. “Difficult.”

The blanket, torn from his old bed, lies twisted on the floor by his feet. Kei picks it up. He folds it and drops it on Akiteru’s stomach. Akiteru smoothes his hand over the loose wrinkle that cuts diagonally across the quilted fabric.

“I can only imagine what your place looks like,” says Kei.

“You’re saying that because of one unfolded blanket?”

Light spring rain taps at the front window.

“It’s not that hard to fold a blanket.”

“You should come see it soon,” Akiteru suggests, pulling a string from the quilt’s seam. “My apartment. It’s not exactly a bachelor pad or whatever, but it’s nice to come home to. You’d like it, Kei. It doesn’t really look like the pictures I sent you forever ago anymore, though.”

“I’ll see it,” Kei tells him.

“You will?”

“Yeah. I’ll visit soon.”

Akiteru grins and bounces his heels on the couch cushion. They thud on the leather. Outside, the rain picks up to join his commotion. Kei turns and watches the water stream down the front window, lines weak and thin, the rain just intense enough to make soft sounds as drops hit the glass. The drizzle distorts the shape of their father’s car on the street. Akiteru sits up when Kei tells him. He drops the blanket to the floor once more. The car rests on the curb despite ample room in the driveway and although through brick and drywall and space, the latch of the driver’s side door echoes through the house. The soft rain ushers their father onto the porch. He knocks once before Kei opens the door.

“Kei,” he greets. “Akiteru.”

“Hey,” his sons reply together.

He swipes a hand through his thin hair. His eyes flit around, taking stock of the room around him. He smells like cheap hotel soap. Clean but dirty. Kei glances at his jacket on the hook by the door, the din of light rainfall pervading the house because his father leaves the door open.

He looks at Kei. “I brought things for you.”

“Brought what?”

“Boxes. I’m going to need help bringing them inside.”

They trail him to the car. Flat planes of cardboard are wedged into the trunk. The backseat had to be flattened to fit them all. They slide them from the car and carry them in. Their father carries the largest of them and they lean the unfolded boxes against the wall in the living room, the stiff cardboard flecked with dark spots from the rain.

“I won’t need this many,” says Kei. He won't need half this many.

“Well,” says his father, “just in case. You look healthy, Akiteru.”

Akiteru stiffens. His presence is prickly, like Kei might bleed out if he stepped too close.

“I am.”

Their father thumbs through the boxes, counting them. “Sorry I haven’t been around,” he admits. He rests them against the wall again. “It’s been difficult. Telling your mother, answering her questions. I have been on the phone all week, it seems, renting moving trucks and settling payments for the new house. This all took more preparation than anything thus far in my life, and it still doesn’t seem like I’ve done enough.”

“Are we supposed to feel sorry for you?” Akiteru wonders.

“Jesus, Akiteru. I’m letting you know, is all.”

Kei asks, “Where’s the record player?”

Their father turns to him. “In storage. I didn’t trust it in my hotel room. I thought I texted you that.”

Kei shakes his head.

“You’re not staying in the new house?” Akiteru interjects.

“Not quite yet. There isn’t any furniture.” Their father gazes around the room again. “It’s all here.”

Akiteru plants himself on the couch as if to cement its place in this house forever. Staring at their father, Akiteru seethes. Kei’s skin picks up heat. He was blind to his brother’s resentment; to the tornado of embers that whirls around the living room now. Akiteru didn’t say a word. When Kei spoke of their father—when he told Akiteru of his betrayal and separation, unwinding miles of thread that kept him from getting lost in the dark, gnarled woods of their parents’ history—Akiteru didn’t say a word. He listened. He didn’t let his frustration seep out, didn’t let it infect Kei. He stockpiled it, waiting for their father. So why couldn’t his parents ever do the same?

“How long have you been here?” asks their father.

“A couple days. Helping Kei.”

He takes his car keys from his pocket like he’s overstayed his welcome. They clink in his hand.

“I see,” he says.

“Since you _obviously_ don’t give a shit,” Akiteru snaps.

Kei leaves them to it. He slinks down the hallway and doesn’t hear his father’s reply because his heart pounds in his ears but he knows it’s firm, edging on the precipice of loud, and Kei is too exhausted to raise his stake in this fight. If he were to, he’s unsure what the point would be anyway or if he could even begin to handle the outcome. He hauls as many boxes as he can down the hallway under his arm. He drags them on the wood and if his father were watching, he would tell him to lift them up. But he isn’t.

He sits behind his bedroom door and itemizes what he wants to take. Little comes to mind. His clothes will fill two large boxes, maybe three if he includes his bulky winter coats in the downstairs closet. He will take his television, his desk and the money box that rests in its corner. He’ll take his laptop and the pathetic spurts of memorabilia that dot his room: the tiny dog figurine Yamaguchi got him from a coin machine in middle school, the glossy photograph of the city skyline his brother snail-mailed to him when he first moved, the clay pencil cup made by his mother, and the terrible fruit snack wrapper Yamaguchi flattened and pinned to the wall above Kei’s dresser three weeks back.

Kei constructs a single small box and then realizes he doesn’t have tape to affix the bottom flaps. He shoves it to the corner of his room and sighs. His breath is loud in the newfound quiet of the house. Only the floorboards creak as hesitant footsteps trail the upstairs hallway.

“Dad left,” Akiteru says through Kei’s bedroom door.

“Okay.”

He turns the knob and peeks in. He stares at the lone box in the corner.

“I don’t have any packing tape,” Kei explains.

The floorboards creak some more as Akiteru shifts his weight from foot to foot. Kei looks up at him.

“Akiteru,” he mutters. “I should have told you sooner.”

“Yeah,” Akiteru agrees, “probably.”

“I didn’t know how.”

“It’s fine, it’s just—Kei, I could’ve helped you.”

Kei wants to ask how. But more so, he wants Akiteru to know he’s grateful; actually, sincerely, completely grateful for both his brother’s warm, righteous qualities that seemed to completely skip Kei as a whole and that, with his company, he wasn’t left alone in his parents’ smoldering wreckage.

“You’re helping now. I’m happy you’re here,” Kei tells him, pushing into it every ounce of energy he has left.

A slow grin breaks over Akiteru’s lips then. But it’s so bright and honest that, had Kei not been there, he wouldn’t know he had fought with his father, swiftly but passionately, in the first time they’d seen each other in a year.


	19. together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you and i have come such a long way  
> for us to start again.
> 
> \- ...and beyond / modern baseball

Endlessly, Kei catalogues all that Yamaguchi is. He catalogues the curve of his shoulders, the pendulum swing in his voice, his convictions, his fears, and all he stands for. Each day, he notices new categories altogether: his body heat as he sits close, the change in Yamaguchi’s eyes when they find Kei in a room, the lack of hesitation before he vocalizes small, mindless thoughts. Kei digs his fingers into his findings and tugs them close. Holding the culmination of Yamaguchi in his hands, it used to be that things got blurry. Or maybe it was just the opposite; Kei stepped too close to the painting and saw the hesitation of each brush stroke and the mixed, muddy shades that stained their canvas.

But the blur is gone now, and it left everything startlingly transparent. Even through Kei’s cracked perspective, like peering through his wounded bedroom window. Maybe the blur receded day by day by day. Maybe it vanished all at once, exploding into nothing when Kei looked the other way. He sees it now: the hesitations behind brush strokes aren’t hesitations at all, but acts of careful diligence. And the muddy shades are only the result of too many rich, adrenalized colors fighting for pigmentation.

All this went unnoticed from far away.

“I can’t do this," Yamaguchi tells him.

“Concentrate."

“How? You’re over there, all handsome and stuff.”

“Yamaguchi, I’ve been awake for nineteen hours.”

“It doesn’t show.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The drizzle-turned-downpour batters the window. Yamaguchi flinches when thunder booms.

“I saw someone do it in five seconds once. He was on the news,” Kei mentions.

“Sorry I can’t be him.”

Kei turns around and throws a bottle cap at him; one of the few that litter Yamaguchi’s desk. It ricochets off his ankle. Yamaguchi barks a laugh that’s too loud in the slumberous house and scooches deeper into the recesses of his untidy bed, its bulky comforter wound into a ball and wedged between the mattress and the wall.

“I saw someone on the internet take all the stickers off and re-stick them in the right places,” he lilts, still fiddling with the Rubik’s cube. “But it wasn’t on the news ‘cause that’s cheating. Also, anyone who can solve one of these is a nerd. They said that on the news. I heard it. It’s true.”

Kei rolls his eyes. “You were the one who told me to do it.”

“Because I wanted to be impressed. But now it’s bogus that I can’t do it, too.”

“Bogus? What year is it?”

“Tsukki, we’re handing a Rubik’s cube back and forth.” The cube creaks when Yamaguchi turns its middle row, creating a solid wall of red. “We’ve successfully suspended time, I think.”

Kei longs for some truth in that. He could stay in Yamaguchi’s warm bedroom, the only voices in the house theirs and theirs alone, quiet but passionate as they cross from the bed to the desk, and Kei’s things would stay scattered forever in his own room miles away instead of packed into boxes taped shut.

“You’ll never solve it like that. Here.”

He meets Yamaguchi on the bed. The lamplight is dim and it warps the harsh colors of the puzzle. Yamaguchi hands the cube to him but Kei shakes his head and places his fingers on Yamaguchi’s instead, sitting on his knees atop the twist of fabric that constitutes his sheets.

“Together,” Kei murmurs. “Okay. Start with white on top.” Gently, he turns the blocks beneath Yamaguchi’s fingers. The puzzle clicks. “We need to make a white cross.”

“You mean you don’t just turn it randomly?” Yamaguchi asks, quieter now with Kei’s hands on him.

“This is just how I learned it. Okay, now move the white corners to meet the cross. Yamaguchi, like this.” Kei uses Yamaguchi’s fingers to flip the blocks. He glances up when they achieve a side of solid white. Yamaguchi is faintly flushed, pink in his cheeks and the tip of his nose. Kei takes a deep, slow breath. “Good,” he compliments, and Yamaguchi blooms a deeper maroon. “Blue and red, now. Just two rows. We need to end up with a yellow cross on top.”

Outside, the rain can’t make up its mind. It tickles the window, then pounds it, then relents again to tap the glass, beckoning them into the storm. It does its best to pull their attention but Kei and Yamaguchi don’t turn, engrossed in touch and color. Skin skims skin, their fingers still connected. Yamaguchi hums as they twist the yellow blocks around and around.

“Yellow is last?” he voices.

“Yes. There. Just another minute.”

Yamaguchi gasps when the final blocks slide into place. Kei takes his hands away and Yamaguchi turns the cube to admire the solid colors. Supremely pleased, he cradles it in his palms. His grin is steadfast and easy. Kei mirrors him.

“Here,” Kei tells him. “I’ll mix it up. We can do it again.”

He splays his hand but Yamaguchi pulls the puzzle out of reach.

“No way, I’m keeping it like this. At least for now. Look, we did it together, Tsukki, like you said.”

Plastic clinks as he sets it on his nightstand. He stares at it for a moment, lit up with pride. Kei’s eyes catch the cluster of freckles on his knee and the possibility that what they have may in coming months reduce to weekends, phone calls, or simply nothing at all slams into Kei like brick and plaster and steel. Yamaguchi’s childhood home collapses on his head, pinning him as he suffocates from lungfuls of debris. Kei doesn’t want to run, doesn’t want to hide, doesn’t want to look over his shoulder when things get complicated. He sees a Rubik’s cube crammed into a brown envelope. He sees it trucked across prefectures, sailed across an ocean. Back and forth, forth and back. White cross to yellow cross.

Kei chokes for air. Distance cannot be what splits him and Yamaguchi in two. There are thousands of other factors that, while brutal and goddamn heartbreaking, are more justified than that. Yamaguchi’s grin shines bright, but not bright enough to traverse seas like lighthouse beams. So Kei will plant himself on whichever shore Yamaguchi calls home.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei blurts, thrown from his own head. “Will you move after graduation?”

Yamaguchi whips around to look at him. “You wanna talk about this?”

“Please,” he begs.

“No, yeah, you just—you caught me off guard,” Yamaguchi says, shifting in place.

He sits on his knees. His hands meet in his lap. Kei stares at the single freckle on his ring finger, just above his second knuckle. Besides this exception, Yamaguchi’s freckles taper off before his forearm, like the constant bending by his elbow scares them off. They are good to focus on when rooms feel too big, and when Kei’s own autonomy overwhelms him.

“I thought about it. I mean, I’m thinking about it,” Yamaguchi answers, his eyes downcast. “There’s a lot of stuff keeping me here, though. A lot of tiny hands grabbing at me, you know? I just don’t know if it’s enough.” He glances up at Kei and back down again. “And then there’s the matter of what you’re gonna do.”

“I don’t know. Genuinely, I don’t,” Kei admits. Yamaguchi nods. Kei sighs at his own helplessness and picks at the cuticle of his thumbnail until Yamaguchi pulls his hand away. “I know a lot of people stop seeing each other when they leave for college,” he says. “Or soon after.”

Yamaguchi leans sheepishly away like Kei will jolt and slice him down the middle.

“That’s common, yeah,” he mumbles.

Kei’s hands ball into fists. A deep breath lifts his shoulders. He recalls Kageyama’s certainty and how it coated his plans as he voiced them, even when the future is so utterly fucked. Muscles straining, Kei reaches for that same brand of surety; of confidence.

“I want to stay together,” he asserts, fingernails digging crescent moons into his palms. Yamaguchi lifts his head to stare hard at him. Kei clears his throat. “I know I haven’t applied anywhere and we might wind up attending the same school regardless, or at least in the same relative place, but in the event that we don’t, I just—”

Yamaguchi cuts him off, crushing him in a hug. Arms around his neck, he holds Kei tight. Kei heaves out a held breath and rests a hand between Yamaguchi’s shoulder blades to keep him close. The low lamplight glows softly on Yamaguchi’s walls, its color as warm as his skin. Yamaguchi brings his palm to the back of his head, hooking Kei’s chin over his shoulder. He presses his mouth to his ear.

“Tomorrow,” he insists, “I’ll show you the schools I’ve looked at. You can apply there, if you want, Kei, and we can look at others.” Breath hot on the shell of his ear, Kei shivers as he nods. Yamaguchi tells him, “I’m with you now, I wanna be with you in college, and you’re stuck with me after that, too.”

It’s so easy for Yamaguchi to sketch out timelines; to configure the future when it takes Kei days, weeks, months to sort it out in his head.

“Yeah,” Kei agrees, and his voice clips off with a gasp.

Yamaguchi mouths at his neck. He hooks two fingers over the collar of Kei’s shirt and tugs down. Kei’s heartbeat gains momentum. Yamaguchi kisses the skin stretched over his collarbone and sighs, his breath sudden and warm, sending a compulsive tremble up Kei’s spine. Yamaguchi leaves the spot alone and switches sides to kiss Kei’s jawbone. He kicks his gnarled sheets out of the way—Kei hears the scratch and shuffle of the fabric—and leans fully into him, pressing Kei’s back to the mattress.

Kei loves Yamaguchi’s weight on top of him. He loves the arch in his back as he leans against him, the clench of Yamaguchi’s thighs around his waist, the cool, natural insistence of his body, and the pressure his position adds to his mouth as it praises him. Yamaguchi kisses just below his ear. He sucks at the sensitive skin, his tongue slick and busy. He hums back when Kei murmurs and the sound amplifies against Kei’s ear, buzzing electric through his body. Restless, he stirs his hips.

By the time Yamaguchi kisses his mouth, Kei is starved for him. Their lips open slowly, tenderly, inviting one another inside with the promise of connection and heat. The huffing of their staggered breath eclipses the din of the rain outside. Had it stopped? Had Kei’s heartbeat swallowed the lesser sound so wholly that it ended altogether?

Above him, Yamaguchi blurs into abstraction. Kei breaks from him.

“My glasses,” he pants.

Yamaguchi leans up and goes to pull them off. He pauses with his fingers on the temples.

“They fogged up?” he breathes. “That’s—that’s so hot.”

“You mean literally.”

“Sure, yeah.”

Yamaguchi sets them on his nightstand next to the Rubik’s cube. Perched on Kei’s abdomen, he stares down at him. His chest heaves. His shirt falls away from his stomach from the way he leans and Kei pulls the fabric between his fingers, bringing Yamaguchi down again. A flash of lightning zaps the room and ignites all four walls, there and gone in an instant.

“Is your door locked?”

Yamaguchi nods. Kei nods back. Their mouths are close enough to touch but stay disconnected, consciously, purposefully, letting the air between them mingle. Yamaguchi's eyes absorb the weak lamplight from the nightstand. Kei admires the new color, stomach fluttering, and pushes his innate fear of humiliation back long enough to slide his hand lower on his back, beneath Yamaguchi’s pants. Yamaguchi sighs as the light material of both his boxers and shorts shift on Kei’s knuckles. Kei pushes his fingertips into his ass—thick, smooth skin, the novelty of which zaps sparks in his gut, right below where Yamaguchi’s groin presses into him.

Head tipped onto Kei’s shoulder, Yamaguchi huffs laborious breaths into the mattress. He arches away from him and blindly sweeps Kei’s shirt up his body, blunt fingernails skimming pale skin. Kei grabs him harder as Yamaguchi drags his hands all along taut, uncovered skin. He kneads his thumbs into the dip below Kei’s ribcage. He fans his fingers over his sides and clenches his waist. Yamaguchi ducks to kiss to the center of his chest. Kei takes his hand from the soft curve of his ass when the implication short-circuits him. Mouth pressed to his chest, Yamaguchi blinks up at him. Kei whines, soft like a breath. Yamaguchi bumps his erection to Kei’s thigh and returns his attention to his front. He smoothes his thumbs in gentle semi-circles when goosebumps dot Kei’s skin.

A sharp, sudden jolt up his spine eclipses Kei’s goosebumps in an instant; Yamaguchi works his lips around his nipple. Kei peers down in time to watch him drag his tongue over it, his fingers kneading into the surrounding skin. It tugs breath after breath from him without warning. Frenzied muscles jump beneath his skin. Kei reaches to knot his hand in Yamaguchi’s fine hair and flinches in turn as Yamaguchi’s lips twitch around his nipple.

“You like that, Tsukki?” he asks so genuinely, gathering guidance. He closes his mouth around pink, firming skin for emphasis.

“Yes,” Kei chokes out. “Really—really sensitive…”

He didn’t know that. His cock twitches substantially. Yamaguchi feels it against his belly and tips forward, the fronts of his teeth pressed to Kei’s chest. Kei has never searched his body the way Yamaguchi is, ever. Yamaguchi spills new colors over his chest, his stomach, and his neck. Taut, pale white becomes pink, becomes red, becomes purple.

“Where—where,” Yamaguchi struggles, superbly distracted with Kei’s hand in his hair. He takes a breath and lifts his head further into his grip, finishing, “Where else?”

Eyes shut, Kei slips a hand between them to rest on his stomach. Yamaguchi hums affirmatively. Between Kei’s knees now, he slides lower. He tongues a wet circle around his navel. He plants slow kisses on Kei’s stomach and near his hips and Kei wants to ask if he feels the grooves of white stretch marks under his lips but he can’t push the words out; his mouth is full of expletives and quick sighs, his teeth busy with the rut they bite into his lower lip. He shoves both hands into the sheets at his sides, clenching until he’s sore. His dick hardens against Yamaguchi’s chest and Yamaguchi presses against him, huffing a long, emphatic sigh. He rests his forehead on Kei’s stomach. His nose pokes into him and Kei twitches.

“Ticklish,” Yamaguchi mumbles. He presses his mouth to Kei’s stomach and speaks into his skin. “You know, I debated whether to blow a raspberry right here, Tsukki, next to your belly button. But then I figured you’d accidentally knee me in the dick.”

“Not accidentally,” huffs Kei.

Yamaguchi breathes a laugh that cools the places he kissed.

“You’re—I mean—why wouldn't I want to stay with you?” he wonders.

“There isn’t enough time on earth for me to answer that.”

Kei winces when Yamaguchi nips the delicate skin of his stomach. He immediately soothes the spot with his lips and Kei reaches to drive his fingers through Yamaguchi’s hair again, soft brown between quivering digits. Mouth slack, Yamaguchi leans into the touch. They breathe together for a minute before Yamaguchi rises to his knees.

“Oh,” Kei groans when he works his palm over his dick.

The material of his shorts scratches on Yamaguchi’s skin and Kei dives into the slight sound, swimming through the full heat of friction, head underwater, submerging totally when Yamaguchi curls his fingers over the waistband of his pants and gently lifts him out. He pulls his shorts further down when Kei’s hips jut forward. His dick slides deeper into Yamaguchi’s hand. Yamaguchi jerks him once and watches Kei drip onto his fingers.

The house is full. They have to be mindful of their noise. Yamaguchi tells him this as he jerks him again, slower this time. Rich red sits high in his cheeks. His eyes are half-lidded and attentive, sliding over Kei’s chest and stomach and lower to watch how his hand wraps around Kei’s dick, still growing. His stare hardly settles. But his eyes hook onto Kei’s with such intention when he ducks down and places a kiss directly on the wet, pink head of his cock.

Kei stifles his yelp, his hand crowded over his mouth.

“ _Yes,_ Kei _,_ ” Yamaguchi hisses, pulled back just enough to speak. “I wanted to do this so many times, you don’t even—you can’t even imagine. I mean it.”

Kei breathes deeply. His fingers pull at the sheets beneath him and he nods up at Yamaguchi, whose passion is endearing even in situations where Kei can hardly gather his thoughts to verbalize them. His body pulls his focus front and center. Kei doesn’t fight it. He listens to it, his dick throbbing between Yamaguchi’s lips as he goes down on him in earnest.

Kei’s stuttering forces the four syllables of Yamaguchi’s name into eight. He breathes it again, his head tipped back on the mattress. Yamaguchi presses open-mouthed kisses up the side of his cock. Kei not only feels them but hears them; the slow, slippery suction of each loving press and the pure longing Yamaguchi emanates by way of them. His hands curl around Kei’s thighs. He takes in a breath and sucks the head of Kei’s cock between his lips, his hands sliding down Kei’s legs to match his mouth. Kei squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to rock his hips and plunge himself deeply, so deeply into the holy, velvet warmth of Yamaguchi’s slippery mouth.

Yamaguchi sinks further. He rubs his tongue up and down Kei’s shaft, the pink muscle firming up to trace something—probably Kei’s veins—before flattening again, spreading wet heat over taut, pulsing skin. Small sounds reverberate in Kei’s throat. He pushes lone syllables into the tight coil of his fist. He would shut the fuck up if he could but Yamaguchi doesn’t tell him to; he just stares foggily up at him and hollows his cheeks in recompense.

“So good, Yamaguchi,” Kei whimpers. His voice breaks.

His body loses mass, lifting from the bed yet still attached, his blood carbonated and bubbling in his veins. Yamaguchi draws his mouth up his dick and drags his tongue in circles around the head. His fingertips dig into him now. Kei feels the dull press of each of them and their resulting flinch when he whines Yamaguchi’s name once more, the verbalization of which is not as compulsive as his short hums of nonsense, yet infinitely more satisfying.

“Ta—Tadashi, hey.” His fingers are sore as he releases his grip on Yamaguchi’s sheets and presses them to the side of his face, so warm like his freckles themselves retain heat. Yamaguchi lifts his head, leaving Kei’s dick wet with a thin coat of spit. Kei glances at the swell of his lips. He gathers the necessary words atop his tongue with effort, like grabbing glass bottles through a thick haze. “I want to come with you. Together. At—at the same time, this time.”

Lightning sets the room ablaze. Yamaguchi sits back on his heels.

“Fuck,” he whispers, his eyes fluttering drunkenly shut. “Yeah.”

He tips forward and crawls up Kei’s front. Yamaguchi presses his face into the crook of his neck and inhales. He stays there as he sheds Kei’s shirt, shimmying out of his own moments after. He sneaks his hand beneath him to rest on Kei’s back and sits up again, lifting Kei with him. Yamaguchi wriggles between his thighs, one of his legs thrown around Kei’s side. He leans up and kisses him, slow and sure like they’ve been apart for ages.

Kei holds their kiss while he dips his hand below Yamaguchi’s waistband. Yamaguchi jerks forward. Their teeth clack together and Kei pulls him from his boxers, watching each tiny twitch as he curls his fingers around Yamaguchi’s cock, stiff and flushed. His hand still on Kei’s back, Yamaguchi pulls him closer until their shoulders bump. Their rampant hearts reach for one another in their chests. Yamaguchi wraps his fingers around Kei’s dick and swears softly into the side of his neck. 

“Okay,” Kei murmurs, pumping him steadily. “Tell me when you’re close.”

“Close right now,” Yamaguchi counters. His arm trembles around Kei's shoulders.

The heat of his palm warms the spit on Kei’s cock. His fingers slide easily though it. With a flinch, Kei curls into him. He splays his hand over his flat chest and feels new muscles shift beneath it. He presses his mouth to Yamaguchi’s ear. 

“Me too. Yamaguchi—Yamaguchi, so am I.”

Their hands lose rhythm after a minute and they bask in the heat of rapid, desperate friction, nerve endings exploding and reconstructing with each second. Kei gasps and sighs into Yamaguchi’s ear. Yamaguchi holds him close. He breathes compliments into his shoulder that have Kei seeing sparks, twinkling in the inky darkness behind his eyelids.

Their lips meet as they come, Yamaguchi just moments behind Kei. It’s not a kiss but more like a press, their mouths soft and slack despite the pressure with which they convene. Yamaguchi comes hotly over his fingers. Kei comes so hard it splashes over his stomach. Sparks turn into stars and then to constellations, to universes and back into stars again as their breathing evens out. Kei and Yamaguchi lean together, skin damp and bodies limp. With so much heat expelled, the room itself seems to sag. Paint drips from the walls. Dry fabric dampens. On the nightstand, the lenses melt from Kei’s glasses.

For one small moment, the future melts, too. It leaves only this: Kei and Yamaguchi, together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had to learn how to solve a rubik's cube to write this chapter but if you handed me one, i still couldn't do it :')


	20. inane details

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter really intimated me to write, which kind of felt good. kinda proud rn.
> 
> happy reading y'all!!

His brother shouts when Kei kills the engine in Yamaguchi’s driveway and rolls the window down, peeking out to assess the unevenness of the car between parallel lines. Akiteru bangs his palm on the side of the car. He hops a little in the passenger seat, thrilled. His bags rest zipped in the backseat. Kei keeps glancing at them in the rearview mirror.

“That was really good Kei!” Akiteru insists. “You just need to work on parking, uh, not so crookedly. But you’ve straightened the wheel after you parked, so that’s great.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Kei glances again. This time, Akiteru catches him.

“I’ll be back in a couple weeks. I’ll definitely be here for your graduation,” he promises.

“Hurray.”

“You should make Dad drive with you. His car is smoother than mine, anyway.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

He frowns. Kei rejects it, glowering through the windshield.

“You know, you’re not twelve anymore. It’s not so cute when you pout.”

The kitchen light shines through the front window of Yamaguchi’s house. Like Kei’s stare taps on the glass, Yamaguchi’s brothers rush to the window. They assault it with their tiny hands. Isao pushes his entire face into it, his nose smashed flat. Akiteru waves. The children lift their hands to wave back, leaving sticky fingerprints on the glass. They never got to know Akiteru the way Yamaguchi did. To them, Kei’s older brother is a just story they are told.

In a rush, the children fly out of sight. They’ve run to get Yamaguchi. Kei imagines them scrambling down the hall, sliding on the hardwood in their socks. He knows the click of Yamaguchi’s bedroom door as they swing it open and pictures the arch of Yamaguchi’s back as he slumps over his desk, or maybe the curves of his legs as he sits cross-legged on his bed.

“Is it naive,” asks Kei, “to believe you’ll end up with the only person you’ve ever been with?”

There’s a short, mechanical hum as Akiteru rolls his window back up.

“I think it’s lucky,” he replies.

Kei glances over. “Too lucky?”

“Kei, a real man makes his own luck.”

“Please don’t quote _Titanic_ at me right now.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

The keys jingle when Kei pulls them from the ignition. He holds them out to his brother. 

“It isn’t naive,” says Akiteru, taking them. “It’s hopeful.”

“And hope isn’t naive?” Kei mumbles, watching sunlight bounce from the silver keyring.

His brother’s face is honest and open; a picture book without a thing to hide.

“Absolutely not,” he answers.

Kei turns away, afraid the look on his brother’s face will make him say more. He leans back and grabs his volleyball bag from the back seat. The scent of rubber and spray deodorant comes with it. The car doors clunk as they’re thrown open and once Akiteru settles in the driver’s seat, he rolls the window down. He makes Kei promise to call him whenever he wants— _seriously—_ before he backs out, tires crunching on the pavement. He waves, his smile like the sun, and Kei turns to watch Yamaguchi follow suit from his front porch. Waves of nostalgia crash into him from both sides. Feet planted to the pavement, he barely withstands the impact.

“What’s that face for?” Yamaguchi asks, head tilted up to watch him.

“Nothing.”

“You miss him already, huh?”

Kei leans into him. “Shut up.”

“No way. How was the drive?”

“Good. Great, actually.”

“I’m proud of you, you know,” Yamaguchi tells him, and Kei grabs the words from the air and pockets them. His shoes scratch on the pavement as he trails Yamaguchi inside. “Did you hit any pedestrians?”

“Just one.”

“I hear if they’re over seventy, it doesn’t count.”

“Oh my god,” Kei sputters. “The only thing I struggle with is parking straight.”

“Huh. Imagine that,” lilts Yamaguchi.

“Shut up. Twice.”

________________

  
When he gets home, Kei expects the house to be dark. He expects the porch light to be out and the front windows to reflect nothing but white moonlight. But most of all, he expects it to be cold. Empty. Daunting, chilled and sterile like a morgue, frozen over from the lack of life inside.

This is not what Kei gets. He gets the light fixture in the kitchen shining obnoxiously onto the front lawn and moonlight snuffed out by LED bulbs. Dry heat from the working kiln climbs the basement stairs. The living room expands around him; the couch is gone, fucking vanished from the house like it was never there, and it’s left a white rectangle on the carpet where filthy feet never wandered. What fills the rectangle are books. Thick, dated art books stacked high near the wall by the half dozen, their glossy jackets wiped clean.

Anxiety flips the contents of his stomach. It’s worse when it’s unanticipated. Kei sets his bag on the living room floor. The downstairs warmth ushers his mother up the staircase and she’s in the room with him before he even realizes it, her frame small and insignificant, squinting at Kei like he’s a stranger. But it’s just because of the clay dust she claps from her hands. It’s useless; the dust clings to her skin, caked onto her palms.

Kei hopes she’s found her inspiration.

“Where’s the couch?” he asks, ashamed of the way the words come out high and squeaky.

His mother’s apron is worse off than her hands. She smoothes her palms down it anyway.

“It was your father’s,” she says.

“Oh.” After twenty-five years, how do they remember? “The room looks bigger.”

His mother nods. “The television will go, too.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t smashed it.”

Kei glances at her. It takes her a moment, but her laugh wades through the room, carried on a single breath. The knot in Kei’s stomach loosens considerably. He lets himself smirk. Misery and self-deprecation swim laps between him and his mother, and the trench they create in the water connects them.

“I haven’t had the time,” his mother admits. 

Kei skims over the art books on the floor. He tries to recall any his mother had walked him through that time on her bed, but nothing looks familiar. Maybe they’re new. 

“Mom,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry.”

His words drag themselves across the carpet. When they reach his mother, she doesn’t kick them away like he anticipates. She picks them up. She takes them in her arms. Four steps close the space between them and his mother rests a hand on Kei’s back. Her temple barely reaches her son’s shoulder. She rests there for the shortest moment until it passes with another breath and she retracts again, shuffling backward. Her powdery handprint sticks to the back of Kei’s black jacket.

Kei wants her to say something. He wants her to tell him she knew it the entire time or she caught his father with The Professional months back—watched them through the fogged window of the café by his father’s work, pink-faced from the winter cold, sipping tea with his hand on her leg. Kei wants her to tell him that she’s alright or if she is not, then that she will be someday, after Kei moves out and she reshapes the house into whatever she wanted it to be all along. Kei wants her to tell him what she makes in the basement and if it was difficult for her. Kei wants her to tell him it isn’t his fault.

“I’m sorry, too,” she confesses instead.

Their blanket apologies hold no warmth. But the sincerity within them does.

Kei takes his bag up from the floor and heads for the hallway. Will the heat of the kiln follow him upstairs? How long will his mother waver after he leaves or will she turn away the second he does, retreating to the basement for hours on end? Will a damp paper towel to the back of his jacket make the stain better or worse?

“Kei.”

He stops. “What?”

His mother teeters in place.

“If you need help packing,” she trails off, her voice dissipating like smoke.

Kei takes her up on that.

He doesn’t remember the last time his mother was in his room. She glances at the walls like it’s a brand new addition, tacked and hammered onto the hallway while she was in the basement, shunning the entirety of the upstairs. Her gaze won’t stick to anything in particular. A mangled, jetsam thought washes into Kei’s mind: there was a time she left his room and didn’t come back for years. He doesn’t linger on it for too long. He tries to recall the last time but the memory recoils from him, drifting out on receding waves.

“I always loved the shape of this room,” she tells him, noting the structure of the room rather than anything in it. “The balcony.”

The balcony thrums at its mention. It pulls Kei’s attention over his shoulder and regret twinges in his stomach. He could have gone out there more. He could have gotten planters with year-round flowers. He could have dragged a couple of chairs out there and made use of the space instead of letting it rot behind glass doors all this time. He could have done a lot of things, but it wouldn’t change the fact that he never really wanted to.

His mother’s inherent efficiency cancels out Kei’s foot-dragging. The room is packed easily away. They leave one box constructed but empty for things Kei needs in the next few days, but very little is left. His toothbrush. His shampoo. His laptop, his phone, and their chargers. People will be hired to remove his desk and dresser. His father said he would buy Kei a new bed; bigger and more expensive like his. It’s the least he owes him. He didn’t word it the same way but Kei is getting good at shoveling the bullshit from his father’s words and unearthing their core.

“The movers will complain if you leave your drawers full,” says his mother, inching another full box—that’s three—away from his dresser. Her fingernail clinks on the knob of the bottom drawer as she taps it.

“They’re empty.”

Kei never puts anything in the bottom drawer. He doesn’t want to bend down so far.

His mother doesn’t hear him, busy with the packing tape that screeches from its giant roll. Kei kneels and the drawer slides out easily despite its years of inactivity. But the drawer shows no sign of said neglect—no webs or spiders, no dust bunnies or lost coins.

The drawer is full. Kei sits back on his heels, thumbing through plastic and fabric: a plain sweatshirt, worn jeans, athletic shorts, a pair of striped boxers, balled-up socks with gaudy patterns, t-shirts Kei stopped wearing last year because they came up too short on him. All Yamaguchi’s size but the latter. Crammed in the corner in a plastic bag is the medicine he takes in summer when his face breaks out. An unopened packet of mint gum props against it. A spare phone charger coils around a depleted stick of deodorant. How long had he kept this drawer?

How had Kei never noticed?

His heart beats gently in his chest. It flutters just enough to let him know it’s there. With care, Kei packs each item away. They fit easily into the smallest box. Yamaguchi’s belongings cling to his hands. He will return them to their spot once his dresser finds its home in his new bedroom. Maybe he’ll put Yamaguchi’s things in a higher drawer next to his own shirts so he won’t have to lean down so far. Soon, the dresser will sit atop brand new floors, surrounded by brand new walls, set into which are brand new, unbroken windows. All Kei’s things get to gather dust someplace else now. At least Yamaguchi’s clandestine rummaging will keep the webs and spiders at bay.

________________

  
His mother falls asleep on the living room couch, drained as though they’d packed away the entire house rather than Kei’s sparse bedroom. Orange sunlight still spills through the windows. His mother uses the same blanket Akiteru had. He left it slung over the back of the couch like he knew she would need it; like he knew she would be there when he couldn’t, refusing to leave Kei in the house alone like their father. Even with his brother gone, the house retains his warmth. But Kei can’t sit in his room and ingest its bareness. It will be easier to face after the sun goes down, when shadows fill even the emptiest corners.

He leaves. He leaves and watches the shades of spring afternoons balloon behind wooly clouds. Pale blue rests atop the sherbet of sunset and the colors seep into one another above the horizon line, bending around distant mountaintops. Would it all look different from his balcony? Kei will test the twenty-three-minute walk from Yamaguchi’s to the toothpick house. He’ll make the Great Shimada Mart Detour on the way back and walk Yamaguchi home. He’ll kiss him in his room and tell him how he found his stash of clothes and Kei’s old shirts and how it felt to see his things sleeping soundly with his own, nestled in the dresser drawer like they belonged. 

Kei will tell Yamaguchi he loves him.

He starts the timer for twenty-three minutes once he passes the eastern side of Yamaguchi’s house. The light in Yamaguchi’s room is on like he knew Kei would walk by wanting something to stare at, but Kei only sees the top corner where the walls and ceiling come together. He tugs his headphones around his neck. It’s too warm for them. He should have brought earbuds. He at least should have brought the splitter. He and Yamaguchi could use it on the way home and Kei could spend the entire walk stacking up his courage brick by brick until he couldn’t peek over it anymore. Then he would tell him.

Kei will admit it first. To swat it back at Yamaguchi isn’t enough. Kei wants to brandish it, polish it, shove it into Yamaguchi’s arms until he grips the sentiment tight. He wants to confess so Yamaguchi will say it back and Kei can squash the sorry grumbling in the back of his mind that tells him that if Yamaguchi felt the same, he would have admitted it by now. Because he is the brave one. Kei spends most nights screaming in reply to the sorry grumbling that maybe things like this are difficult—not maybe, they _are_ —and for once, it isn’t Kei alone who struggles to open every door to the dark inside, neon signs flashing welcomingly above their busted frames.

Maybe Kei’s parents felt a similar anxiety when they first confessed their love to one another. But theirs was a warning sign—one they locked out when it barked on their doorstep. What about Yamaguchi’s father and late mother? Kei figures their love was seamless. He figures it flowed back and forth in equal parts words, actions, and thoughts, splashing warmly against one another until the end. Yamaguchi being a product of such love, it must have been nothing other than honest, groundbreaking devotion. Was the last time they said it more memorable than the very first? How long until Yamaguchi’s father forgot the tone of her voice, the shape her lips formed around three short words? Has he forgotten at all? How different was their love compared to how he loves Hana? How similarly can someone really love two different people?

On its hill, the peak of the toothpick house pokes the late afternoon sky.

The climb is steeper on foot and the roads are paved differently from nearer neighborhoods but the house shines the same where it towers on the hill, grinning at Kei with its wide windows. Kei missed it. He missed its warmth and inherent familiarity. He missed its shiny wood features and its too-short driveway. In said driveway sits his father’s car, smack dab in the middle of a work day. Kei halts for a moment, remembers his timer, and keeps going. The grass on the front lawn is shorter. It’s been cut.

From the front porch, Kei pictures the empty street outside the house lined with moving trucks. He sees men in coordinating muscle shirts unloading his dresser, his tables, and his desk, grimacing under the weight as they struggle up staircases and down narrow hallways. He sees his father on the landing, advising the men to take care not to nick the floors. Kei pulls his headphones off. He opens the front door.

He sees his father fucking his realtor, humping and groaning on the only piece of furniture in the room: the couch. Its leather squelches beneath their bodies. The Professional’s smooth, pale back glares in the sunlight Kei lets in through the doorway. That isn’t right. Something isn’t right. The hair isn’t right. In Kei’s pocket, the timer trills.

Hana turns over her shoulder.

________________ 

  
“Kei, slow down.”

“Can’t.”

His brother’s voice is thin and distant in his ear. The gravel on the street pops and crackles underfoot and Kei doesn’t remember calling Akiteru, just that he speaks to him now, but now he wants to hang up. It’s too loud. Everything is too loud. Sound screams while other senses whisper.

“You’re sure it was her?” Akiteru asks again, his voice peaked.

“I have to go.”

“Wait, no, talk to me!”

“No, I don’t wanna talk, I’m so sick of fucking _talking!”_

“Okay, okay, then just stay on the phone until—”

Kei's brain hammers against his skull and he doesn’t hear himself hang up, doesn’t hear the pop and crackle of the gravel anymore, doesn’t hear the frantic words slung from the familiar car as it rolls alongside him. But he hears the screech of tires as it peels out. His father leaves behind black skid marks on gray pavement and the sick stench of charred rubber. The timer trills in Kei’s pocket again because his trembling fingers hit snooze instead of stop.

Behind him, wood, brick, and plaster crash into the unsuspecting earth. Kei watches it fall. Its gorgeous wood festers before his eyes. Maggots squirm within soft, rotted beams. Gnarled vines crawl over the pavement of the squat driveway. The house comes apart on its hilltop, all four walls slamming to the ground in all directions. In the Medieval special on television when he was ten, they showed a diagram of a man with each of his limbs tied to horses. The horses shot off in four respective directions and skin separated from muscle, muscle separated from bone, and bone separate from bone until blood caked the clotted dirt for miles. Instant death.

The toothpick house is instantly, instantly dead.

Kei waits at the crosswalk when he remembers the familiar wink of the birdbath key, fallen from a jacket pocket. He crosses the main road as he links the champagne bottle in the trunk to the cork in Yamaguchi’s couch. He passes the school when he recalls the mileage or lack thereof on his father’s car. He pushes open the bell-armed door of Shimada Mart as he envisions the sympathy in Hana’s eyes, forever swimming. These were not inane details.

Yamaguchi’s not behind the counter.

“Hey,” Kei calls out and doubles over, deeply, _deeply_ affronted by his absence.

The only customers in the place shuffle around him toward the door, their eyes decidedly downcast. Shimada leans over the counter to watch him. Kei huffs at the tile floor and squints as its pattern blurs and trembles. Yamaguchi should be here. He’s supposed to be here.

“Tsukki? Are you alright? You look—”

“It’s Tsukishima,” Kei snaps at the tile. “Please.”

Shimada leans off the counter, giving him space. Kei straightens himself.

“Where’s Yamaguchi?”

“I sent him home early. Are you alright, Tsukishima?” Shimada implores again.

“No.”

It feels good to admit it. It’s like someone’s punctured a hole through Kei’s neck as he choked and air came through again, fresh and sudden. At least until the next moment catches up and Kei’s stomach falls through for the thousandth time and every single element within him drops into the dark, so deep that he doesn’t hear when they hit the bottom.

“Oh.” Shimada pauses to push his glasses up his nose. “Well, you can stick around here if you need to. No worries.”

“If I need to?” Kei repeats.

Shimada straightens the magazines by the register. Kei unclenches his fists when he finds him staring.

“It’s just,” he answers lowly, “Yamaguchi told me about your, um— _home situation_.”

With the grand wall of rage and grief within him, how does Kei still have ample room for shame?

“I kind of yanked it out of him. Just know that you can always—”

“Listen,” he interjects. He knows enough. “It’s fine. Do you know where he went?”

________________  
  


Yamaguchi’s house has always been too far from Shimada Mart. But it’s twice as far now, Yamaguchi is twice as far from him now, and a deeper kind of dread stacks in his chest by the step. The sight of the birdbath on the porch isn’t refreshing. Kei leans to grab the key but he gets only its clean outline, surrounded by dirt and grit. Of course—his father has it.

Kei goes to knock but the door opens from the inside. Hana stares up at him.

“I told them,” she whispers, and at least she has the sense to look mortified. She sounds different. She sounds alien. It isn’t the voice Kei grew up with; floral and lofty. This voice is controlled. This voice is autoplayed. It’s the voice of someone who should have locked the front fucking door.

Kei sidles by her and into the house. Calamity spins from the back bedroom. Tsuru screams. Tsuru hollers. Tsuru sobs and hisses and all the while, her father consoles. Kei hears his thick, careful drone from the hallway. He can’t make out words over the thump, thump, thump of his heartbeat as it explodes in his ears. The opposite of his sister’s, Yamaguchi’s bedroom is silent. Kei’s heart is the loudest thing in it, ripping through his chest and bouncing off the walls, smacking against Yamaguchi’s desk, end table and television. It bounces back to him with a sharp, piercing inhale.

Yamaguchi does not turn. He sits on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap. And when Kei goes to him, he leans away. Kei’s arms drop like deadweight. He figured Yamaguchi would wrap around him and cry into his neck, into his shoulder, soaking his shirt and skin. He would cry every bit of water and salt out of his body and Kei would make him drink three glasses of water to even himself out. Instead, Yamaguchi is cold. The only inch that brings them closer is incidental; from the dip Kei’s weight creates in the mattress. He just sits there, cold, detached and still, like a defective computer with its screen frozen. His stepmother tore his cord straight from the wall.

“Where are your brothers?” Kei wonders, disturbing the quiet. “Fumika?”

“Grandpa’s.”

Kei takes his cord in his hands. He struggles to find an outlet.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admits.

“How did you not know?” Yamaguchi fires back, staring straight ahead.

“What?”

“How did you not know it was her? There must have been something, _some_ kind of something. Some indication,” he goes on slowly, and then winces like although he spent an entire hour finding the words, they hadn’t come out the way he planned. 

Kei says, “I wasn’t exactly looking.”

He doesn’t tell Yamaguchi the list he compiled. There’s no use. They could unravel everything, every conversation and note but they would always end up here: unplugged in Yamaguchi’s static-silence bedroom. Yamaguchi’s eyes are big. They bore into his closet door like he’ll find the the shapes of champagne corks or spare, twinkling keys carved into the wood.

“What now?” he wonders flatly. “What are we supposed to do now, all of us?”

He rolls his fingers into his palms and out again. His hands tremble.

“We get through this,” Kei answers, because it’s what Yamaguchi would say.

“How?”

Even though Yamaguchi won’t look back, Kei stares at him.

“I have no idea,” he admits.

“My family,” Yamaguchi whimpers, and he holds his hands out in front of him.

“Your family is still a family,” Kei tells him with conviction.

“No—it’s _broken_.”

Yamaguchi shakes his head. He doubles over and buries his face in his hands, still shaking. It’s less disturbing than his blue screen of death but now Kei just aches, every bone within him bending until the point of breakage, his own presence ugly and dark next to Yamaguchi who so desperately needs the light. But Kei can’t quit smothering himself. He flinches when Yamaguchi grips his knee. He grips him tight like he knows he wants to touch Kei, to be closer and feel him there, but also like a punishment. He recoils after a moment. Kei splits open.

Should he have dove into every conversation, every note? Should he have pocketed the champagne cork and ravaged through the recycling to find its bottle? Should he have kept the key that fell from his father’s pocket? Should Kei have stitched all these details as they occurred only to find how seamlessly they came together? What then? Should he have joined his mother in rifling through each letter sent through the mail? Should Kei have spoken up more, involved himself in every catastrophe? Should it all have mattered to him more? Would it make a difference if it did?

A sudden mass of grief bashes into his chest. Kei loses his breath. The corpses of the toothpick house, of Yamaguchi’s parents’ marriage, and any sense of normalcy he found rot around him, and their stench brings bile further up his throat. Kei smacks his chest for air. He swallows quick, desperate lungfuls. Just enough to speak.

“I’m also your family,” he promises Yamaguchi, leaning into him.

“You’re broken, too,” Yamaguchi warbles back.

He touches Kei again, gentle this time to let Kei know he doesn’t mean it like it sounds. But it still doesn’t last. The touch doesn’t last. Yamaguchi’s face is dry when he pulls up from his hands and Kei doesn't know what to do, what to say, how to reassure Yamaguchi that he will come out the other side of this pristine and intact despite all the sheer brokenness that surrounds him; Kei and his family, shattered and slashing all around him, shiny and dangerous.

How could he possibly make it out unscathed?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [the certain things we lack 8tracks playlist](https://8tracks.com/deanpendragon/the-certain-things-we-lack)


	21. boxcutter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I can't even tell anymore, y'know? My own dad. I can't tell if he's even tryin'."
> 
> "It sounds hard."
> 
> "It is."
> 
> "It sounds awful hard."
> 
> "It is. You think, here's my dad, you know? Here's the big guy who's always gonna protect me. And then you wake up the next day and he fucks up, and the day after he can't even protect himself. Makes you think...what kinda desperation does a person inherit from their parents? And is there any way out and away from it, except for death?"
> 
> \- material, vol. 1 / ales kot

“The boxcutter is in the office,” Kei’s mother mentions, “if you need it.”

“Okay.”

“I can help,” she offers.

“No. Thanks.”

Kei turns his back on her. The old floor creaks as she trades her weight from foot to foot.

“Kei,” she calls, stopping him. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was Tadashi’s mother.”

“Stepmother,” Kei corrects.

“Yes. Hana.”

“I know. You can stop telling me now.”

She’s like the very records she broke. Around and around and around. She insists she didn’t know, that she was very much in the dark regarding details but Kei doesn’t care enough not to believe her. It doesn’t matter. The same wall would have erected regardless, separating their lives into two halves: before Kei found out his father is sleeping with Yamaguchi’s married stepmother, after Kei found out his father is sleeping with Yamaguchi’s married stepmother.

Kei leaves the boxes sealed. Strips of clear tape reflect the lamplight in weird, oblong shapes. He can’t unpack them yet. He can’t unpack them yet. It’s not enough time. The boxes have to stay packed a little while longer. Kei swears he hears them rustling in his sleep; his things itch to return to their places on shelves, in drawers and on hangers, gathering particles of dust and gradually losing pigment. They will have to wait. It’s not enough time.

Kei falls asleep at dawn. He wakes up in mid-afternoon. 

He moves from his bed to his desk to the kitchen table to the living room couch to the living room floor in cycles, catching odd half-hours of sleep on softer surfaces. Sometimes he stands in the doorway to his father’s office and eyes where the desk used to sit. They took it a day and a half ago. It will look atrocious in the toothpick house. It’s simply too large and while there are plenty of rooms, none are spacious enough for it. Paperclips and staples still litter the rug.

In the basement, Kei’s mother hums. The din crawls up the stairs and tiptoes around the living room while Kei sits on the floor with his back to the couch, missing Yamaguchi. Is his house just as quiet? Have his siblings been unplugged by the shift like their brother? Won’t fingerprints left in such fresh cement alter the foundation forever? Or are they too young to be properly burdened, naive and able to change easily in time with their world around them?

Yamaguchi picks up on the fourth ring.

“You’re home from work?” Kei asks.

“Yeah, Tsukki.”

“Oh. You didn’t tell me.”

Yamaguchi breathes into the receiver. “Sorry.”

“No. I mean, you don’t have to—do you want to come over?”

Clay clinks against stone down in the basement; Kei’s mother puts something in the kiln. The heat wafts upstairs and floods the living room. His face is on fire suddenly, he’s probably red, but his forehead is cool when he presses a hand to it. It feels wrong. It feels like a bad dream.

“I don’t know,” Yamaguchi tells him.

“I could come over there,” Kei offers. He presses his hand to his forehead again—still cool.

“I don’t know,” Yamaguchi says again.

“Okay.”

Yamaguchi doesn’t come over. Kei doesn’t go over there. He sits on the living room floor with his back against the couch and his hand to his forehead. He sits until the kiln’s heat dissipates. He sits until mid-afternoon becomes early evening and only gets up to shut the basement door when his mother’s humming gives him a headache.

________________

  
It’s December all over again when Kei walks Yamaguchi to work. His stare is icy. His words are chilled. Kei tries to melt him with a hand on his back but gets freezer burn instead. He doesn’t ask why Yamaguchi told Shimada about his parents. He doesn’t ask if he told him about their father and stepmother. He doesn’t ask why Yamaguchi trusts him so much and how he could possibly, especially when the only one Kei trusts so much and inexplicably is Yamaguchi.

It’s December, but they graduate in two weeks.

“Did any of those schools get back to you?” Yamaguchi asks, his stare downcast.

“Not yet.”

“Oh.”

“Is that a bad sign?” Kei wonders, half-joking.

Yamaguchi doesn’t grin. His eyes lock on to Shimada Mart in the distance. He shrugs and says, “Sometimes it takes a while.”

His voice is tight. His words are clipped. He stands too far away. They hover by the bike rack at the side of the building and Yamaguchi thanks Kei for walking him. He still won’t meet his eyes. This isn’t Yamaguchi. This is someone who stepped out from a mirror Yamaguchi stood in front of. This is a busted mosaic of Kei’s boyfriend pieced together with quick, trembling hands and clear-drying glue.

“We could do our homework later,” Yamaguchi tells him.

Kei blinks. “You want to?”

“I mean, if you want.”

“Kind of want to do our homework, kind of want to taste all your freckles,” he says, and it’s offbeat and empty and poorly-timed but Kei needs _something,_ needs Yamaguchi to grin or flush or flirt back the way he’s good at.

Yamaguchi bristles. Kei holds his breath.

Yamaguchi comes at him with an intensity that tells Kei he’s either going to be punched or kissed but it’s neither; Yamaguchi grabs him, the sides of Kei’s face cupped in his hands and finally, finally looks at him. Fury surges in his eyes, blown wide. Kei freezes. Yamaguchi puffs breath after breath in his face until he blurs the bottom halves of his lenses. Yamaguchi is on his tiptoes. His palms are hot on Kei’s cheeks. His fingertips are firm on his temples. He drops down on flat feet and pulls his mouth into a tight line, furious red blooming across his face. Kei can’t think of one goddamn thing to say.

“It’s not your fault,” Yamaguchi fumes, his head shaking, “I know that. Realistically, I know it has nothing to do with you. It was your dad. But you just have to let me be mad. You think it’s dumb, I _know_ , but you have to let me be angry for a while.” He huffs winded breaths between them and glances over his shoulder. Finding nothing, he turns back. “Because once I stop being mad, what have I got, Kei? What the hell do I do then?”

He searches Kei’s face for answers but Kei has nothing. Yamaguchi drops his hands.

“I don’t think it’s dumb,” Kei murmurs. 

“Your parents didn’t love each other. Mine did. I thought they did.”

He nods. Kei never had a scrap of faith in his parents. Yamaguchi had plenty in his own, in his stepmother, and now he watches it circle the drain. How often has he thought of his mother in the last few days? How many times has he assured himself that she would never, ever do what Hana has done to his father? To her own children?

“Hana took all her clothes. Did I tell you?”

Kei shakes his head.

“She wants to take my brothers and Fumika with her. To the toothpick house, Kei, with your father. Dad told me that this morning. I don’t know how any of this will end. I have no idea how anything will end up,” Yamaguchi grumbles through gritted teeth. He glares at Kei. “That was supposed to be your house. Your things were _packed_ , and now they have to be put back. Doesn’t that piss you off? Even a little? They snapped off a whole branch of your life, don’t you get it?”

“I’m not so fragile,” Kei replies.

“What, like me?”

“I don’t mean it like that. I just—instead of angry, I just feel empty. Pits where anger should be. I don’t know.”

Watching him, Yamaguchi eases off. He files his edges and moves closer. It’s Kei who can’t meet his eyes now, afraid he’ll find pity swirling in his stare. He doesn’t want it. He looks over Yamaguchi’s shoulder at the brick wall of the shop. Yamaguchi’s shift started minutes ago.

“I don’t know how it will end, either,” Kei mutters, imagining the scrape of brick beneath his fingertips. “I just know things will be different. But wrinkles of change iron out over time. Remember?”

“It isn’t that easy.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

Yamaguchi stares at Kei’s feet. Clouds rearrange and sunlight falls on his face, leaking shadows over his cheeks.

“I wish Mom were here,” he confesses quietly.

“I know,” Kei murmurs back.

________________

  
Kei sees him from the end of the street when he’s just a pinprick on his front porch.

“You don’t have strep,” says Kageyama.

“No shit,” says Kei.

He follows him inside and they sit amongst the boxes on Kei’s bedroom floor. The hardwood is cool. Kei’s mother keeps the thermostat lower than his father did. Kei hands Kageyama the boxcutter and Kageyama digs his hands into full boxes, tossing their contents onto the bed. Heamasses piles of clothing now wrinkled, collars crooked and long sleeves drooping over the edge of the mattress. Kei hangs what needs to be hung. He folds what needs to be folded.

“I went to your new house,” Kageyama tells him.

Kei says nothing.

“Your dad turned me away. He said you were here.”

“I never left.”

Kageyama’s more careful with the lamp he lifts from the largest box. Its harp clinks when he sets it on the floor.

“Yeah, well, he was being so weird. I was like, what the fuck. So I called Yamaguchi 'cause you didn't pick up.”

Kei stares into his closet. “Yamaguchi told you.”

“No. He didn’t pick up, either.”

“Oh."

“She was there,” says Kageyama, “when I went over. His mom.”

“Stepmom,” Kei corrects. The distinction grows more important by the day.

“Right, yeah. Not hard to connect those dots.”

“Even for you?”

“Shut the hell up,” Kageyama replies, but his voice is light. It’s careful. It tiptoes where it usually trudges. He lifts the lampshade from the box at last and rests it on the floor next to the harp and base. His hands grip the edge of the box, hesitant. “And I’m sorry,” he finishes.

Kei turns and stares at the back of his head.

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.”

Kageyama turns too. They both nod. Kageyama cuts open another box—medium sized this time.

“What’s in here?”

“Where?”

He holds Kei’s money box, dust covered and peeling at the corners. He opens it when Kei says he can and thumbs through the bills, counting out loud like a little kid. He snaps the rubber band back into place when he’s done and drops the money back in the box. With the side of his hand, he wipes the dust from the lid and replaces it. 

“Your parents are loaded. You still haven’t spent it? Any of it?”

“No.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing. I don’t know,” Kei answers, attempting to pull the wrinkles from an old t-shirt.

Maybe he’ll save it until he starts college. He can’t eat boxed noodles for four years. Maybe he’ll put it towards a car. Maybe he’ll throw the money into something stupid and pointless, like a digital camera he will never use or hardcover books he will never read. Maybe he’ll get new headphones. Maybe he’ll download a completely new music library and throw out all the old shit he used to like and start fresh, start anew, learning words and rhythms by the day until he grows sick of them, too. Then he’ll start over again. Maybe he will dye his hair and buy a new wardrobe and move toward the sea and become someone else. Maybe he’ll buy a metal baseball bat and smash every light bulb in the toothpick house, plunging it into total darkness. Maybe he’ll forgo the bulbs and start with his father’s knees.

Maybe Yamaguchi is right. Maybe there is more anger in him than he knows.

Kageyama sets the money box aside and pulls the smallest cardboard box in front of himself. It’s the last box Kei had packed, full of Yamaguchi’s things. The tape that holds it together is ripped and crooked because Kei couldn’t get the dispenser to work right and didn’t want to ask his mother for help.

“Wait,” says Kei. “Not that one. Grab another.”

Kageyama screws up his face. “What’s in here?”

“None of your business. Grab another.”

He huffs. He pushes Yamaguchi’s box out of the way and pulls another across the floor.

“Where’s Yamaguchi, anyway?” he asks like he knows.

“Work.”

Kei pulls another shirt from the shrinking pile on the bed. He slips it onto a hanger and sticks it in his closet, staring. He hasn’t seen it in years. He’s surprised he remembers it. He should have gone through all his clothes before he packed them away. He could have used even less of the boxes his father brought him. Then his father could have brought them into the house on his own and Kei and Akiteru wouldn’t have had to help at all. They could have stayed inside and watched through the front window as their father struggled with an armful of cardboard sheets, flecked with dark spots from the falling rain outside.

“I think he’ll break up with me,” Kei discloses, and his whole being throbs with a phantom ache.

“ _What_?” bellows Kageyama, whirling around. “Why?”

“It’s too tall.”

Kei’s knees creak. He has to sit. He shoves the pile of clothes to the wall and sits on his bed, staring into the dark of his closet.

“What’s too tall?” Kageyama presses.

“What happened,” Kei mutters. “My dad, his stepmom. It’s too tall to scale. He’s frustrated.”

“Frustrated with your _parents_.”

“It’s all the same.”

Kageyama squints up at him from the floor.

“Jesus, no it isn’t,” he insists, shaking his head. “It so isn’t. Sometimes shitty parents have good kids. Like you and Yamaguchi. Just like sometimes good parents have really shitty kids, like that kid in my neighborhood who hides in the bushes and scares joggers with his homemade air horn. Listen,” he dictates, and Kei glances over. “It’s not like you had any say in what your dad did, the same way Yamaguchi didn’t with his stepmom. Yamaguchi’s smart. He knows that. Give him some credit, Tsukishima. You always pull shit from the ground that’s just starting to sprout.”

Kageyama cups his hands like they’re full of soil. He drops them and Kei pictures the loamy dirt splattering over his bedroom floor, small leaves and thin stems sprouting through the mess, all green and twitchy.

“This one next?” Kageyama asks him, pulling another box toward himself.

Kei lifts his head. He clears his throat.

“Yeah,” he answers. “That one next.”

________________

  
Kei can’t talk to his brother about it. It’s like he’s too far away. It’s like Kei doesn’t trust the distance his words have to travel across phone lines to get to him, like they’ll be stolen during transport and scrambled by the time they get to the other side. Will he feel the same if he and Yamaguchi end up hundreds of miles apart? Will their voices sound different over oceans, caked with sea salt?

“I can literally be there tonight.”

“It’s okay.”

“Kei, are you serious?” Akiteru demands.

Kei stares at the ceiling and tells him, “I want to be alone.”

The ceiling of his bedroom in the toothpick house was coffered. It was lovely. It was decorative and interesting, surrounded on all sides by wood molding. It was nothing like the smooth ceiling he stares at now. Boring. Flat white can only stay interesting for a handful of minutes. Kei wore it out eighteen years ago.

He doesn’t want to be alone, not really. His mother has been gone all morning, but the click of the front door marks her return. Kei meant to turn the television on an hour ago. He didn’t mean to sit in silence for so long, whether it was before or after his brother’s phone call, but the quiet keeps hanging around. He meant to unpack the very last box of Yamaguchi’s things. He meant to replace them in his dresser drawer but Kei hates to break the news to them—Yamaguchi’s phone charger, his deodorant, his gaudy yet endearing socks—that they're in the same place they started, sitting on creaky old floors below Kei’s flat white ceiling. No coffer. No molding. But in spring when sunlight streams through the adjacent balcony doors, the furniture seems to glow, all warm and happy. If Kei tells them this, maybe he can convince Yamaguchi’s things to stay.

His ceiling bores him. Kei goes downstairs.

His father stands in the center of the living room, completely still like furniture. Kei could hang things on his shoulders like a coat rack. The bottom step creaks beneath Kei’s feet. His father turns. He looks like hell.

When Kei wished not to be alone, he should have been more specific.

“Kei,” his father addresses steadily.

“What the fuck?” Kei blurts.

“Kei—”

“Get out.”

His father turns stern.

“I didn’t come here for an argument with my own son.”

“Too bad, you’re getting one.”

“Kei,” he says for the third time. “You have to listen to me.”

“No, fuck that. I don’t have to listen to you anymore. You screwed up _everything_ ,” Kei insists, stepping forward. His face burns. His heart batters his ribcage, his head spinning from the whiplash of such quiet calmness to this. “Why did you do that? There are millions of other people, why her? Why Hana? You didn’t even _talk_ when Yamaguchi and I were kids, let alone fuck—“

“That’s enough,” interjects his father, but Kei can’t stop.

“How can you stand yourself? How can you stand in this house right now? How?” he wonders, his voice breaking from passion.

His father remains hard like stone. “Now, listen. We are adults. Consenting adults.”

“You’re selfish. That’s all you are.”

“I am _not_ selfish,” his father bellows.

His raised voice is a pair of quick hands tugging at a rubber band. Sudden and violent, Kei snaps.

“You just had to open the fucking cage,” he shouts, “and I would have been _fine!_ Fine for me, fine for Yamaguchi, _fuck._ It’s not my fault. None of it is _my fault!”_

His father recoils from his outburst. “What on earth are—”

“You were selfish with Mom and you’ll be selfish with Hana. You turn everything around you to shit—me, Mom, Hana...She couldn’t have always been that way. She couldn’t. You’ll push her to the edge just like Mom,” Kei growls, his hands gripped so tight they hurt. Each word is a pickaxe that tap, tap, taps his father’s wall of stone. “You couldn’t even fix my goddamn window. I was just a _kid_. So what am I supposed to do now?” His arms are tense and they tremble when he throws them out to his sides, adrenaline zig-zagging through him. “Exist forever in your wreckage?”

Before him, his father crumbles.

“We—we wanted to ease you into it. That was the plan. You and Tadashi, his brothers, all of you,” he insists.

“That’s why you’ve been so nice to him, right? To Yamaguchi? Offering him rides, buttering him up, all interested as shit about his job.” Words tumble out as soon as thoughts gain coherence. Kei’s pulse smacks at his wrists and throat. “You don’t care about him. You care about approval.”

His father’s kindness was never out of appreciation or acceptance. It was a way to gain leverage.

“I thought,” his father stumbles, “I thought—you and he are practically brothers already, and…”

“Brothers?” Kei spits. “You fucking moron, we’re _together_.”

His father stiffens. The next instant, he goes slack.

“Oh,” he utters. And again, “Oh, I—”

Kei can’t hear over the roaring in his stomach. He’s sick, so sickened by the strict, familial lines his father tries to force onto them in place of the love that already ties them together. He tries to replace chain link with yarn. Kei steps forward. Left out in the sun for far too long, his father withers.

“Do you really think this is going to happen?” Kei asks. “Do you really think she’s going to move into that house with you? All her kids, too?”

His father clenches his teeth. Kei sees the twitch in his cheek. The room is hot around them. Heat from Kei’s words pushes into every corner, every inch of space. He can’t stay, can’t melt with his father. Kei turns his back on him. Spring wind rushes in when he opens the front door and Kei stops with one foot on the porch.

“They’re gonna fucking hate you,” he growls, and slams the door shut.

His heartbeat only quickens when he sees Yamaguchi. He stops short on the driveway when he notices Kei.

“Tsukki?” he says.

“Come on.” Kei grabs his sleeve in passing, quick steps scraping the pavement. “Don’t go in.”

“What? Why?”

The front door swings open and Kei’s father steps onto the porch.

“Shit,” Kei swears.

Yamaguchi’s mouth twists into a frown. Immediately, he seethes. He tenses in Kei’s grip and pivots to face his father. Kei’s father stills, his son’s name dying in his throat. His eyes are big like they’ve swallowed something. He already crawls from Kei’s fury. Yamaguchi’s will put him in the ground.

“What’s he doing here?” Yamaguchi pivots again. “What are you doing here?”

“I just came to talk to my son.”

“You don’t even deserve that.”

Kei’s father takes a deep breath. His chest rises and falls with it.

“Listen,” he begins.

“You listen to _me—_ I’m through with fucking listening! I listen to my brothers’ questions, I listen to my sister scream for days, I listen to my lying stepmom make stupid excuses for herself, for _you_ , I listen to my Dad’s consoling,” Yamaguchi rants, his voice manic and rushing, “and he’s _twenty_ times the father you ever were or could ever be and you can bet I told my siblings every shitty thing you’ve ever done to Kei and his mom, and they don’t want a thing in hell to do with you.”

Yamaguchi’s shoulders heave with his panting. Kei’s father holds up his hand.

“You—you did—” he attempts. He shakes his head as if to wake himself. “No, wait.”

“I never trusted you,” snaps Yamaguchi.

“Tadashi, hang on.”

“ _No!”_  Yamaguchi roars, ripping out of Kei’s grip and rushing toward Kei’s father, “you don’t get to call me that! You call me by my family name, the family you obliterated like—“

Kei is on him in a moment, dragging him off the porch with his arms under Yamaguchi’s. Yamaguchi struggles in his grip. They stumble on the front lawn and fall to the ground, Yamaguchi’s fist still clenched and hovering in the air in front of him. The car engine blares to life in the driveway. 

“Why are you protecting him?” Yamaguchi yells, knocking his fist on his knee.

“I’m protecting _you_ ,” Kei yells back.

Tires crunch on the pavement and just like that, his father is gone.

They pant and heave on the grass, heartbeats slowing over long, dragging minutes. The sun glares down on them in disapproval. Kei’s house looms over them. Its shadow rests just centimeters from the toes of their shoes. Yamaguchi clears his throat, sore from yelling. Kei unbends his knees and the shadow swallows his feet. Watching him, Yamaguchi does the same. The heels of their shoes squeak because the grass is damp from lack of sunlight. If he squints hard enough, Kei sees drops of dew. 

Kei has memories of dew. He has memories of dew in the way that memories cling onto the dullest things in an attempt to make sense of their plainness. He remembers mornings spent waiting on the street outside Yamaguchi’s house. He remembers how he felt when the front door swung open: like guessing the time and getting it right down to the minute. He remembers Yamaguchi running, nearly tripping over himself on his way to him, his stepmother in the doorway in his wake. He never used the driveway. Yamaguchi shot straight through the yard and the dew soaked into his socks, his shoes, leaching into the bottommost inch of his pants. Kei can’t remember what he did yesterday morning. But he remembers that.

He shifts Yamaguchi’s way. He knocks their shoes together. A stunted, mangled cough of a laugh escapes him.

“Did you just try to punch my father?” Kei asks.

The question wobbles in such dense air. Yamaguchi pinches the grass in between his legs and rips it from the earth.

“Least he deserves,” he replies.

He sprinkles the blades on his knee. After a moment, he sweeps them off.

“Fuck me,” Yamaguchi groans, collapsing back on the grass. 

“Yeah,” Kei agrees, mirroring him.

From here on the ground, grass poking through their shirts, at least there’s nowhere to go but up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	22. fresh, clean air

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanna confess it in a whisper that's just loud enough to make out  
> want you to listen from the kitchen to me confessing on the couch  
> i wanna be stronger than your dad was for your mom.  
> i wanna be stronger than your dad was for your mom.
> 
> \- santa monica / the front bottoms

Even though he doesn’t wrap around him like usual, Yamaguchi holds Kei’s hand in his sleep. His fingers are cool and loose. His skin is dry. It scratches against Kei’s with a soft sound under the blanket as his fingers flinch. He grabs at something in his dream. Kei falls asleep before he can guess what that could be.

It’s been a week, and Yamaguchi still hasn’t cried. Kei keeps waiting.

The soft, sliding sound is gone when he wakes up. His room lacks the gentle waft of a ceiling fan. Yamaguchi’s room offers the best kind of white noise: the kind that keeps them cool. Instead, the mechanical hum of the air conditioner drones into the blackness. Moonlight barely there sneaks through the slats of his blinds. The pale streaks don’t quite hit the ceiling. They linger on the top part of the adjacent wall, bending over the junction where two walls make a corner. Kei shuffles to the edge of the bed and stands. He sways in place. He hasn’t slept long enough. Yamaguchi slept even less.

When had he left? Was he afraid as he walked home in the dark? Did he text Kei when he got home, or was it too hard to explain? Had he hovered over Kei with an outstretched hand, debated, and decided against waking him? Was his father asleep when he called and asked to be picked up? Or was he up still, just like his son, staring at moonlight on the bedroom wall because it was the only thing that broke the darkness?

There’s a cough outside; the lament of a sore throat. 

Finding Yamaguchi on the balcony feels like a dream. He sits on the unpolished wood with his back to the house, staring through the railings and over the rooftop of the smaller home behind Kei’s. Fearful of splinters, Kei is careful as he sits next to him.

“Aren’t you cold?” Kei asks before he realizes it’s warm out, even in the sun’s absence.

Yamaguchi shakes his head. Kei pulls his knees to his chest.

“What are you thinking about?”

“You, now,” answers Yamaguchi.

Kei rests his chin on his knee. “I’m sorry.”

“Ha.”

Stars replace clouds. They’re just white, dazzling pinpricks because Kei didn’t put on his glasses before he came out. But white pinpricks are all they are anyway, right? What is he really missing?

“I bet you wish you came out here more,” says Yamaguchi, tipping his head back. “When you thought you were moving.”

“Yeah. I did.”

Now the balcony just feels like a dead limb in need of amputation. Yamaguchi is the diamond bracelet that dangles from its limp wrist.

“Plants,” Kei continues. “I wished I’d gotten plants.”

“The same plants you wanna get Akiteru?”

He shakes his head. “Better.”

Yamaguchi’s lips quirk in a grin. It falls slowly. It fades into the night like a receding flashlight beam, wobbling as it departs through neighboring patios and back lawns. Bugs hidden in shrubs cry out for attention. Kei stares down into the lap pool in his backyard that harbors a small shine from the light fixture in the kitchen, still on. He never put the cover back on it like his father told him to. Leaves that the filter has yet to eat float around its perimeter.

“Yamaguchi,” he starts, “did you—did you really tell your siblings about my dad? About the things he has done?”

“No. I just said it. I can’t ruin them like that.”

Kei imagines the impressions stories like that would leave if Yamaguchi had told them: deep claw marks in the drying concrete of their foundation. Suddenly, he is scared for them. Fumika, Isao, Misashi. Given a second chance, his father would not crack their concrete like he did Kei’s. Surely, he would not. He would nurture it. With the closing of his fist, Kei strangles his useless jealousy.

“Good. He’ll be better to them.”

“Because?” prompts Yamaguchi, turning to him.

“Because they aren’t like me. Because Hana isn’t like my mom.” Yamaguchi waits for more. Kei shakes his head, utterly defeated. “I can’t explain it any more efficiently. I just feel it.”

Yamaguchi shifts on the weather-worn wood. He glowers between the balcony railings and for a moment Kei thinks he’s pissed him off again—maybe this time he actually will go home and the cycle will begin again, leaving Kei to spin on endlessly. But Yamaguchi’s face softens and tension leaks from his shoulders. He slumps against the house.

“Tsukki. I—I didn’t mean what I said. In my room.”

“What?”

“You’re not broken, Kei,” Yamaguchi promises, his hands toying with one another in his lap.

Briefly, Kei considers the distinction between _Kei_ and _Tsukki_ and where the two overlap in Yamaguchi’s head.

“I’m not?” he wonders.

“No. We’re just bent right now.”

Bent. But Kei is so feeble, so ready to break like the fingernail Yamaguchi uses to idly push back his cuticles.

“I don’t feel strong enough,” he admits.

“Are you kidding?” counters Yamaguchi. “You are—you’re the epitome of strength, Tsukki. You’ve been through it all. With your parents, I mean, even before all this. _Years_ before all this. You never—you never deserved any of it.” Yamaguchi looks down the row of houses, stacked neatly beside each other like maybe Kei’s timeline will stretch over their rooftops and he’ll be able to see just how bad it got, just how quickly and for how long. For a split second, Kei panics. He doesn’t want him to see. Yamaguchi hears the silent plea and turns back. “And I yelled at you in front of Shimada Mart, I was so mad. But it was never at you, you didn’t—you didn’t deserve that either,” Yamaguchi repeats, his head shaking back and forth, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really—”

Kei interrupts the fidgeting of Yamaguchi’s hands with one of his own, slipping it between his warm palms and hearing that same soft, sliding sound they made beneath his covers when the night was young. Yamaguchi clasps him tightly. His grip relents after a moment but the pressure of it lingers. Kei digs his nails into any hint of intimacy he gets because he found himself starving for it days ago, his stomach empty and growling for Yamaguchi’s full, bloated love. He resists the urge to curl up in his lap like a cat.

It isn’t about deserving it. It’s about dealing with it.

“Kei,” Yamaguchi mumbles, and Kei turns his head. He watches Yamaguchi watch the lap pool on the ground floor. Does he notice the leaves, too? “What we have to go through,” he starts and then hesitates. “What we _have_ gone through—with our parents, I mean—that’s—that’s not us, okay?” He talks slowly, like he learns each word as he says it. “I mean, that doesn’t define us. It doesn’t make us _us_. That’s not—that can’t be all we are.”

Crickets hum. Kei nods. The world around them expands and contracts with a breath of fresh, clean air.

________________

  
From the living room, Yamaguchi’s house looks the same. The television rests on an angle near the wall. Legos spill from their blocky container, tipped onto its side. The bistro table sits in the corner and they still have their couch. But Hana has taken her things. He’s only seen Yamaguchi’s parents’ bedroom a handful of times, and now Kei is grateful for it because he can’t stand to picture it differently—its closet half-empty, shelves bare, one side of the bathroom vanity clear of toiletries.

It’s like Hana is on a trip. A vacation.

Yamaguchi’s father tells him this as Kei drinks the coffee he made, piping hot and far too strong, and listens to every word. His frame is heavy. It reaches for the floor. Kei keeps his mug on the counter; he wants his hands free in case Yamaguchi’s father decides to slip completely off his bones, pooling onto the kitchen tile. Tsuru creeps around in the hallway just outside the room. Kei hears her footsteps, a lump lodged in his throat. Yamaguchi’s father keeps his mug between his palms. He lifts with both hands every time he takes a drink.

“Plenty of options,” he says of visitation plans for the children. There are weekends and alternating days, alternating weeks and half-days. It sounds like so much effort for something that should be effortless. Like purifying water from the pond out back when they could just use the tap. “But I shouldn’t be talking to you about this.”

“Why not? I asked.”

Kei is fascinated with divorce. He has pushed the concept on his own parents since he was fifteen.

“It’s messy, son, and you’re way too involved.”

“I can’t help that.”

“I know it. I know it,” Yamaguchi’s father sighs.

He pats the nape of Kei’s neck, his palm warm from his coffee mug. When it comes to Yamaguchi’s parents, the idea of divorce loses its luster. The splitting of Kei’s mother and father meant freedom and peace. It meant silence. The splitting of Yamaguchi’s father and stepmother means something different entirely, and Kei is not yet willing to dive into exactly what. He is petrified he will lose the spark of hope he just began to harbor.

Yamaguchi’s father pours the rest of his coffee into a thermos and Kei follows him out of the kitchen. Tsuru clings to the hallway wall, still in her pajamas. Her father stops and points a finger at her. Kei resists the urge to hide behind him like a child; like Isao might.

“Don’t you give him shit just ‘cause I’m gone, girlie.”

Tsuru rolls her eyes. Her father reaches for her and pulls her into his side. He kisses the top of her head and Tsuru’s eyes close, her mouth curved in a natural grin and Kei suddenly feels like he should look the other way, utterly undeserving of witnessing their easy displays of familial affection. Yamaguchi’s father leaves through the front door. Kei starts down the hallway to Yamaguchi’s room.

“I wasn’t going to give you shit. Not now, at least,” Tsuru mumbles, reeling him backward.

He turns. “You weren’t?”

Tsuru shakes her head. She’s wearing Yamaguchi’s socks again—green and white stripes.

“I was gonna say, uh, not _thanks_ , but something. Something a little less—”

“Kind?” Kei finishes.

“I guess, yeah.”

“For what?”

“I, um,” Tsuru struggles, flicking the hair tie on her wrist.

On her tiptoes, she peeks over Kei’s shoulder. She drops down and waves him closer. Kei steps to the mouth of the hallway. He keeps enough distance to where he can step out of range if she decides to deck him in the jaw, but close enough to still be wary. But her face is lax, harmless. Her emotions look much like Yamaguchi’s, just with a serious lack of tact. Kei inches closer.

“So, ever since we found out about my stepmom, that fucking bitch, I’ve been at Hiroji’s a lot,” swears Tsuru, her voice low. She looks over Kei’s shoulder again and then back to him. “I know that Tadashi and I are twins, we’re brother and sister, and I love him a lot. But there’s just—there’re things I can talk to Hiroji about that I don’t with Tadashi. Or can’t. It’s just—it’s different, I guess.”

Kei nods. He scrolls through a mile-long mental list of what he talks about with Yamaguchi but can’t with Akiteru, and it grows every day. Tsuru nods back at him. Her wrist is red from where she keeps snapping her hair tie as she speaks.

“You get it?” she asks him.

“Yeah. I have a brother, too.”

“Oh, yeah. I knew that. But this last week especially, he’s talked me down so much. I owe him. I don’t know. He’s just been—Hiroji, I mean, he’s been—well, he’s probably the reason I haven’t punched you in the gut so hard your dick dad himself would feel it. Because I really, really thought about it.”

“Lovely.”

“Wait, I’m almost finished.”

“By all means.”

“I was just thinking that sometimes there are things we tell our boyfriends that we can’t really tell our siblings.”

“Yeah,” Kei agrees. “I know what you mean.”

“Yeah, well.” Tsuru digs her toe into the carpet. Her stare slides over the living room wall before it lands on Kei again. “I wanted to say thanks. For being that person for my brother, you know. Even if he can’t talk to me about stuff, he’s got you. He at least gets to talk about it so it’s not all balled up inside.”

Her sincerity strips Kei of any wit he may have, any curt reply.

“You’re welcome,” he promises, almost out of breath.

She knocked the wind from him. Her task complete, Tsuru turns on her heel and heads for the hallway. Her curly hair bounces with her stride.

“Tsuru,” says Kei, catching her before she goes.

Tsuru waits in the doorway. 

“I’m—I’m sorry. About all of it.”

She stares for a moment. Over her shoulder, she gives Kei a short, sole nod.

“Cards we’re dealt,” she answers, and disappears down the hall.

________________

  
“Did you get your coffee?”

“Yeah.”

Yamaguchi lies face down on his bed, his phone pulled to his face. It ticks with each letter he types and then there’s the familiar swoosh of a sent message, spinning pixels through cyberspace. Kei shuts the door behind him. Yamaguchi ticks away again and Kei eyes the nightstand. It’s cluttered with shit: empty and half-empty water bottles, guide books with worn corners, a roll of tape without a holder, a candle with a black smudge on the inner left-hand side, a lighter with the safety band pried off. It’s all very Yamaguchi. Kei sets his mug between the alarm clock and a pack of gel pens, still encased in plastic. His coffee is already lukewarm.

Kei climbs onto the bed, onto Yamaguchi, planting himself on Yamaguchi’s butt with his knees astride his hips.

“What’re you doing?” Yamaguchi asks.

“Sitting.”

The ticking stops. 

“I talked to your dad,” Kei tells him.

“About what?”

“Graduation. Child visitation.”

“Oh,” says Yamaguchi, pushing his phone onto the nightstand. An empty water bottle topples and clunks hollowly on the floor. He crosses his arms on the bed. He rests his forehead on his wrist and mentions, “You used to do this a lot before we started going out. Sit on me like this, I mean. But only when you were upset.”

“Really?”

Kei’s stare crawls along the puckers in the back of his t-shirt. Yamaguchi hums.

“It would drive me fucking nuts.”

Kei frowns. “Sorry.”

“No, I mean, like, turned on, Tsukki.”

“Oh. Shit,” he sighs, pulling at the hem of Yamaguchi’s shirt and watching the puckers disappear. He counts to ten to quell his heartbeat. When it continues to pound at fifteen, Kei gives up. He slips his hands under Yamaguchi’s shirt. The fabric is light on his knuckles. Fingertips press into firm skin. Warm. Always warm. “Are my hands cold?”

“Not really,” breathes Yamaguchi, shifting a bit.

Kei bites the inside of his lip. Wanting to see the contrast of their skin tones, he shoves Yamaguchi’s shirt up further. Kei fans his fingers. They glare from their tan canvas. His eyes catch the small dip in the lowest point of Yamaguchi’s back and without a thought, Kei drags his finger over it, drawing a soft line above the waistband of his shorts. Yamaguchi shivers. Under Kei, he shifts again. Kei takes his hands away. Yamaguchi inhales when he gently grips his sides instead, Kei’s thumbs rubbing firm semi-circles over taught skin.

Yamaguchi is tense. He holds tension in his shoulders, in his back. Kei feels it under his hands and tries to work it away, dragging firm fingertips between his shoulder-blades, rubbing warm palms down his sides, massaging slow fingers into the back of his neck down to his shoulders. He missed his skin. Kei missed his skin. He misses his mouth, too, and his tongue. It has been a week. They graduate in four days. How is Kei supposed to withstand entire months, entire semesters without him if they wind up hundreds of miles apart? How does anybody do it? How does anyone love through computer screens and over phone lines, thrown oceans apart from the ones they love? How much strength does it take? Exactly how much strength does Kei lack?

He leans over Yamaguchi. Kei rests his forehead between his shoulder-blades. He breathes into his skin until Yamaguchi squirms again, then he draws back, pushing his glasses into his hair. He leaves a kiss where he rested. He follows with another, then another—slow, delicate kisses in a line down Yamaguchi’s back. Yamaguchi puffs shallow breaths into the comforter. Kei keeps his hands pressed below his shoulder-blades, right where his freckles taper off as he slides down his body. He likes to think he can feel them on his palms, sizzling like embers. Yamaguchi’s skin is smooth under his lips and the tip of his nose. Under his tongue, too. Kei drags it wetly into the dip above Yamaguchi’s waistband and Yamaguchi draws out a sigh, muscles twitching beneath Kei’s tongue.

With great effort, Kei lifts his head. He follows the same line up Yamaguchi’s back, laying kisses up his spine. He loves each notch more than the last. Like a leaky faucet, stress drips from Yamaguchi’s body. Kei’s fingers sweep his sides. Kei touches him, kneads him until he returns to where he started. His forehead lies heavy between his shoulder-blades. He waits for his breathing to even out and climbs off him when Yamaguchi’s does the same, slow and gentle.

He lies at his side. Yamaguchi turns, flushed red. Their bodies face each other.

They were like this the first time they kissed—really, deeply kissed—and the memory flushes to the forefront of Kei’s mind like a wave crawls up the shore. He thought he would move then. He thought he knew his father then. He thought Yamaguchi would tire of him then. Then, he thought the rest of the school year would crumble quietly into nothing. Kei did not prepare for the mine he triggered just before the finish line. Blood half dried blots Yamaguchi’s comforter, crimson dyeing blue a deep, dark navy.

“Talk about my elements,” Yamaguchi requests. He digs the side of his face into his pillow.

“What?”

“My endless elements. Remember?”

The conversation feels so distant now. Kei drags the swamp that is his memory and dredges it up. It reeks of cardboard and bleach—of Shimada Mart. Yamaguchi pulls Kei’s glasses from his hair and lies them on the bed between them. They click when he folds in their temples. He watches Kei, his stare patient and expectant.

“You’re warm,” Kei begins. He fixates on a loose string on the hem of Yamaguchi’s shirt sleeve. “You’re a good listener, and you’re patient. I think your patience is matched only by your enthusiasm—both of which are extremely charming.”

“You think I’m charming?” wonders Yamaguchi.

“You are a lot of fun.”

“You think I’m _fun_?”

“You’re slowing my momentum,” Kei insists.

“Sorry, sorry.”

“You’re hardworking and smart. You have a good attitude. You’re compassionate, easy to talk to, very expressive,” he tells him, and copper spins brightly around Yamaguchi’s pupils, proving his point. Kei spins, too. “Your generosity is boundless. You let me into your life, your home. Your family. I think,” he starts, and then stops to breathe. “I think about you all the time. I think about your voice. Your face, your warmth.” His heart pushes to the top of his chest and Kei shakes his head, his affection creeping up his throat. He spins faster. “You’re a supportive brother. An exemplary son. A, uh—a good lover.”

Dizzy, Kei stops. He takes his glasses from the bed and puts them on.

“Kei,” croaks Yamaguchi, his flush crystal clear and furious.

“What?”

“Just wanted to say it,” he replies. He stares at Kei’s mouth. “I wasn’t—I didn’t expect all that.”

“You asked.”

“Yeah, I _know_ , but that was—that was a lot.”

“Well, I think about it a lot. I told you.”

Kei chews the inside of his cheek. His throat burns. The fire of confession sizzles behind his tonsils, flames licking the backs of his wisdom teeth. It never petered out. It never cooled. It has just been waiting, burning, pacing up and down Kei’s throat until his mouth opens wide enough to allow its escape. He loves Yamaguchi. But his tongue and teeth get in the way.

He asks, “If you liked me back in October, why did I kiss you first?”

“It had to be you, duh,” Yamaguchi answers instantly, like he’d anticipated the question all morning. He wraps his fingers around Kei’s wrist. “I had to know that it was something you wanted all on your own. I mean, Tsukki, you knew how I felt. Absolutely crazy about you. I just had to hope you would catch up.”

“What do you mean?” Kei mutters.

“I just mean that kissing someone back isn’t the same as kissing someone. You know?”

It takes a moment, but Kei nods. He gets it. He does. It’s the same reason he doesn’t kiss Yamaguchi right now, pulling him close with a hand on his back to press their mouths softly together, bed sheets shifting beneath them. His heart leaps at the notion. Kei quiets it but it leaps again when Yamaguchi leans in and presses a kiss to the tip of his nose, granting and absconding body heat in the frame of a single second. Yamaguchi grins, pleased. He tightens his grip on Kei’s wrist.

“I think about you nonstop, too,” he promises. “Since way before October. Way, way, before.”

He presses his thumb to Kei’s wrist to find his pulse throbbing, rapid, absolutely crazy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're over 70,000 words! this is now longer than campfire in your chest in my documents and i'm emo.
> 
> thank you guys for continuing to read!


	23. so much future

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've been getting so much love lately and i just wanna say thank you. thank you! thank you. <3
> 
> happy reading!

Driving with her, Kei’s mother doesn’t direct him like his father. She doesn’t tell him where to turn or use every street name as if Kei hasn’t walked them all his life. She offers advice from the passenger seat and lets Kei handle the pump when the gas tank runs empty. Kei follows the same roads down which his brother took him but the scenery is different; harder to appreciate as it blurs by the driver’s side window. But the long stretches of pavement the car eats with each moment are a beautiful gray, and they shimmer beneath orange sunlight. Kei can appreciate that.

Clouds devour the sun by the time he parks in front of Shimada Mart.

“If it rains, I’ll come pick you up,” says his mother.

“We have umbrellas. But thanks.”

She doesn’t push it. She pauses with her hand gripping the car door.

“Love you,” she tells Kei.

A single raindrop splats on Kei’s left lens. It warps the shape of the car, the street, the shop.

“Me too,” says Kei.

The raindrop slides over the black frame of his glasses and drips onto his cheek. He watches his mother’s car until it’s gone. He doesn’t remember the last time she told him she loved him. He can’t grasp memories of conversations they’ve had because they’re all too slight, too stunted and slippery. But his fingers wrap steadily around this exchange, still floating in the air like exhaust from the car’s tailpipe. It’s soft and cotton-light in his hand. He’s gentle as he pockets it.

He sits on a park bench across the street from the shop and eyes the dark, distant clouds. They threaten rain but won’t deliver. Kei untangles the headphone splitter he brought so they could listen to his music on the walk home. Will the sky split before then? Will they be able to hear over the rain as it splatters on the street around them? The darkest clouds hang over the school, ready to soak the rooftops and neighboring woods. Are the trees greener there now, lousy with full, fanning leaves? What if it storms during the graduation ceremony on Wednesday? Will the rain carry through until then? Does everyone just shuffle inside? Or does the ceremony take place inside to begin with, the rain nothing more than soothing background noise for anxious students?

Still in his apron, Yamaguchi sits at Kei’s side. Kei takes out his earbuds.

“How was work?”

“Long,” Yamaguchi tells him.

He lifts the other earbud from Kei's lap and puts it in. Kei does the same. He resists the urge to mediate the music and instead lets it play on its own, shuffling freely through soft, easy songs that Kei grows bored of except for when he listens to them with Yamaguchi. They sound okay, then. The grass around the bench sways in the wind. It feels thick and damp; pre-storm. But the sky still won’t split. When Kei looks over, Yamaguchi’s head is in his hands.

He’s crying.

At last, the clouds burst. Not the ones in the sky but the ones that hang right over both their heads, gray and bubbling, splitting finally and engulfing them, soaking warm rain right through their clothes. Kei pulls the headphones from their ears.

“Tadashi, hey,” he murmurs, but shuts his mouth at the instant pressure that wells in his throat and behind his face. His head tips forward with the weight of it. He blinks and blinks like when he was little and wanted to cry about small, stupid things but never did until he learned not to, ever, simply clipping the impulse from his body like a hangnail. He doesn’t need it the way Yamaguchi does. “I’m here,” he promises. He wraps his arm around Yamaguchi’s shaking shoulders.

Had he held back at work? Had the pressure built hour by hour, pinning his feet to the checkered tile? Had Shimada noticed? Had Yamaguchi told him what was wrong between deep, pacifying breaths? Had Shimada listened with his hand heavy on his back, the same way Kei’s father used to console him when he was small? How long has Yamaguchi wanted to cry? How long has he waited to cry? Will it ever, ever be as freeing as he wants it to be?

Yamaguchi presses his forehead to Kei’s collarbone and sobs for everything he can’t possibly put into words: his disappointment, his anxieties, his sheer frustration with his life around him as it slips on its crumbling foundation, his arms sore from the way he tries to hold it up. He cries for Kei, too. Kei holds him on the park bench and watches the grass sway around their feet.

It never rains.

________________

  
“That came while you were gone,” Kei’s mother tells him from the kitchen table.

A brown envelope sits on the marble counter, scrawled and stamped with black ink. Wary of its prestigious presence, Kei keeps his distance. Yamaguchi peers over his shoulder. Kei’s name is emblazoned across the envelope’s front in big, bold letters and until he sees it, Kei figures it has something to do with divorce.

He steps closer. Yamaguchi follows.

“Hey. I know that stamp,” he insists.

“You do?”

A palpable shift—a slight rearranging of air molecules in the room. Kei and Yamaguchi’s wide eyes meet. Kei grabs the envelope. Yamaguchi grabs scissors. Kei’s mother sits up straighter in her chair and watches the commotion from across the room.

Kei is accepted to a university in Tohoku; Yamaguchi’s second choice.

His life stretches out before him. A road previously under construction is swept clean and Kei stares down, down, down until it blurs into the horizon. There is a future. There is a future after all this. There are cars and licenses and apartments and paychecks and degrees and hope. There is hope. Not even the past week had shaken that from him. His hope clings onto him like a child clings to their parents’ pant leg. Kei feels it tug. He teeters in place.

His mother congratulates him and Yamaguchi waits until they’re in his room to hug Kei tight, his thin arms around his neck, his nose poking the shell of Kei’s ear. Kei sweeps his hands through his hair and tells him he can’t believe it. He can’t believe it. He really can’t believe it.

“Believe it,” declares Yamaguchi, the proof wobbling in his hand as he waves it around.

“I’m trying.”

“Well, I believe it. Do you know what this means?” he goes on. “It means we’re going to the same school. You and me, Kei. Us. God, it’s like, it’s like,” he stutters, groping the air for a metaphor, “it’s like someone’s just shined a flashlight into the well we’ve been stuck in for two weeks. And they told us they’re coming back with a ladder. I just—you and me, you know? Finally.”

“I know.”

“We’re going to the same school,” Yamaguchi says a second time, drilling the reality of it into his head. His freckles dive into his smile lines. “I mean, Dad’s hardly sleeping, the house is like a morgue, Mom’s still dead, my twin sister wants to move in with her boyfriend, and I’m just—”

“You can move in with your boyfriend.”

“I’m just so—just—finally, you know? Something _good_.”

“Yeah. Something good,” Kei emphasizes in turn, his heart ramming against his ribcage.

Yamaguchi proudly props the letter up on the top shelf of Kei’s desk and lets it bask in the sun that comes through the broken window. The furniture in the room—Kei’s chair, his bed, his dresser, and end table—all stare up at the crisp, bright paper that gleams down on them, envious of its top-shelf throne. Kei watches Yamaguchi watch the window. He watches his eyes trace the crack and blinks when Yamaguchi turns and catches him.

“You don’t have to keep tabs on me,” he claims. “I’m really not gonna cry again.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Yamaguchi rolls his eyes. His cheeks stay a jolly red.

“You’re not half as subtle as you think you are, Tsukki. Hate to break it to you. But you’re twice as cute as you think you are, so it evens out.”

“Zero twice is zero.”

He barks a laugh. “See, like, that’s cute.”

Kei grins. How is it that Yamaguchi is able to pluck bits of gold from mounds of shattered glass?

“How are you feeling?” Kei asks him.

“Drained. Tired. Crying makes me tired.”

“I know.”

“But I’m happy. Too happy to sleep, even though I feel like I could knock out for hours. No, days.”

“We could hibernate until after graduation,” Kei suggests. Yamaguchi nods vehemently. Over his shoulder, the gleaming letter catches Kei’s attention. Its potential pulses through the room. He meets Yamaguchi’s eyes again. “Yamaguchi,” he begins steadily. “I know that it’s your second choice. Tohoku. I don’t want you to feel obligated to join me there, or even influenced by me—”

“Would you shut up?”

Yamaguchi pushes up on his tiptoes and kisses Kei right on the mouth. He’s there and gone before Kei can convince him to stay but the press of his lips lingers, warm and familiar, like returning to his own bed after weeks of sleeping on the floor. Color floods Kei’s face. He didn’t even get to kiss him back. But Yamaguchi grins up at him regardless, eyes tired yet so, so bright. They flutter shut when Kei cards his hand through his bangs. He pushes them to the side and presses his mouth to Yamaguchi’s forehead in a soft, staying kiss. He wraps him in a hug.

Kei asks, “Do you want to try and nap?”

“Yeah,” answers Yamaguchi, his breath warm on Kei’s throat. “Only if you carry me.”

“My bed is three feet away.”

“I’m tired. So tired, Tsukki.”

“Yamaguchi—”

Yamaguchi goes slack in his arms and Kei has to duck and lift him from the floor before he collapses like a stringless puppet. Arms tight around his middle, Kei steps forward and ducks again to drop him onto the bed. Its hidden springs protest the sudden weight. Yamaguchi barks a laugh and rolls to his side by the wall, fingers curled into the front of Kei’s shirt, yanking him down, too.

“You’re supposed to set me down like I’m precious metals,” he insists. “Not drop me like a block of cement.”

“Sorry. I didn’t read the handbook.”

“Next time, then. Don’t forget.”

“You are definitely precious.”

“I can’t tell if that was genuine or not,” Yamaguchi admits.

“It absolutely was.”

“I can’t tell with that, either.”

“Oh, I’m being totally serious.”

“Tsukki, oh my god.”

Kei grins again. Yamaguchi smacks a hand to his chest and keeps it there. His hair fans over Kei’s pillow.

“We graduate on Wednesday,” he mentions.

Suddenly, Kei is exhausted. “I know."

“Are you scared?” Yamaguchi wonders, drumming his fingers on Kei’s chest.

Scared?  
  
“You mean nervous?”

“No. I mean scared.”

Kei sees a knife coming down, chopping the strings of the routine to which he has tied himself all his life.

“I might be.”

“Yeah.” Yamaguchi drums his fingers again. “So am I.”

The air conditioner kicks on and drones through the quiet room, catching the letter in its easy draft. The paper flutters. It could never know what it’s done. It couldn’t know the way it’s tangled Kei and Yamaguchi’s futures together with the ink printed across its body, with the stamp dried on its shoulder, with the signature scribbled below its knees. It couldn’t know and if it could, Kei wouldn’t know the words to tell it. The paper gleams. The paper pulses. The paper flutters and, like a lullaby, Yamaguchi falls asleep to it. 

________________  
  


Kei thought graduation would pass like an electric shock; a wave that tore through town, crackling against the school walls and making three hundred heads of hair stick straight up. Sparks would shoot up the curtains that line the stage and thunderbolts would pierce the roof. Instead, graduation passes like smog. It drifts through the gymnasium and leaves Kei half-awake in his chair until his name is called, and Yamaguchi’s soon after. 

He remembers his footwork and gets a handshake and sits back down and all the while, he feels strings being plucked, separating him from himself. There’s another molecular shift, just like when he received his acceptance letter. Yamaguchi notices, too. He looks so proud. He pushes his bangs off his sweaty forehead and searches for his family in the crowd—his brothers and sister, his father, his grandparents. Kei’s heart hops in his chest. His mother sits nearby. It was his brother’s doing. Akiteru hangs an arm around her neck and responds with zeal over his shoulder to whatever Yamaguchi’s father says from one row back, Misashi and Isao jumpy in their seats at his side. Fumika ties her hair up and smoothes it back down again. Up, down, up, down, up. By the time the final speech is delivered, Yamaguchi is as twitchy as his siblings. Kei puts a hand on his knee. He leaves it there when the kid on Yamaguchi's opposite side glances over.

“Almost done,” he tells him.

“We're almost out,” Yamaguchi whispers back.

The absence of Kei’s father is palpable. It hides densely in the lingering smog. He exists only miles away and yet the distance between him and Kei is so unbelievably great, so mountainous and rugged, ripping holes in brand new tires. His father never showed up, stranded out there between mile markers. But then, why would he come? Why the fuck does Kei expect him to? For all Kei knows, maybe he is here. Maybe he wanted to be. Maybe he and Hana shuffled through the gym doors with the crowd, camouflaged in hats and sunglasses like the criminals they are. But they wouldn’t. Kei knows they wouldn’t. He just wishes his eyes would stop looking for them.

Akiteru gets weepy and lets him drive his car to Kageyama’s house when they’re set free. He lets Yamaguchi sit in the front seat even though Kei insists it’s illegal, and Kei plots out a time in the near future when he’s confident enough driving with one hand on the steering wheel to hold Yamaguchi’s with the other like his brother and Airi did last winter. 

Future. There is so much future.

“You’re so hospitable, Kageyama,” Yamaguchi gushes when he hands him a clean fork.

“Yeah, right. You think I want all these people in here, touching all my stuff? We should’ve had this at Tsukishima’s.”

“Absolutely not,” says Kei.

Yamaguchi beams and plunges his fork into a hearty slice of cake.

“Me and Tsukki will stay and help you clean up.”

“Tsukki will do no such thing.”

Fumika, Hinata, and his little sister weave through the clusters of people in the living room, cackling breathlessly. They stop short and sprint down the adjacent hallway, pursued swiftly by Yamaguchi’s brothers. Yamaguchi cheers them on with a mouthful of cake. Kageyama watches them go and turns back, sighing. 

“Of course he’s playing with the little kids. Of course he is.”

“They’re his kind,” Kei replies.

Yamaguchi chokes on his food. Kei pushes his soda can to him across the coffee table. Yamaguchi takes a swig and then sets it and his plate down, the plastic party fork clinking on icing-smeared porcelain.

“Do you guys feel that?” he asks, throwing his arms out to his sides. Yamaguchi closes his eyes like he’s on the peak of a mountain instead of Kageyama’s rigid couch, the usual, chemical smell of his house lost within the scent of baked sugar and vanilla candles. “That sense of finality?”

“It just feels like a lot of pressure to me.”

“Yeah,” grunts Kageyama.

Yamaguchi grins anyway. Kei wants to remember him in his mountaintop pose, all free and full of pride. He wants to remember the human buzz of Kageyama’s house, the metal sound of his soda can as it slid across the coffee table, the rich, sweet taste of frosting and the orange hue it leaves on Yamaguchi’s mouth even after he’s wiped it off.

________________

  
They stay after the masses have left. Kageyama pulls streamers from the wall. Yamaguchi recycles paper cups. Akiteru fluffs throw pillows and Kei scrubs frosting from porcelain plates like he did after Yamaguchi’s birthday party in November. Tsuru helps too, wiping down counters and bitching about the rings left on tabletops despite the array of available coasters. Kageyama’s mother is so grateful, she sends the rest of the cake home with them. Yamaguchi hugs the box to his chest on the ride home.

“I’ll put it in the fridge for you,” Tsuru promises, one foot on her driveway.

“Don’t let anyone else get it.”

“Okay.”

“Unless Dad wants some.”

“O- _kay_ , Tadashi.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“This is a weird double standard,” she insists. “How come I can’t stay the night at Hiroji’s?"

“Don’t think about it too hard,” Kei tells her.

“Whatever. Oh, and congrats.”

Tsuru presses a kiss to her twin brother’s cheek—the first bit of overt softness Kei has seen between them in weeks—and it’s so gentle, so serene, and such a relief that he could fall sleep right in the backseat of his brother’s car with his head on Yamaguchi’s shoulder.

When they get home, Akiteru stares at the empty rectangle of carpet, shades lighter than the rest. He spares it a glance and moves on, but Kei knows he wants to ask. Kei receives his hug and watches him lumber down the hallway to his room. Had he felt the shift, too? Had seeing him and Yamaguchi on the same stage he stood years earlier ripped his roots from the past and catapulted him into the present? Could it really be that simple? If their father hadn’t taken the couch, would Akiteru sleep there without a second thought? Or is his choice to return to his bedroom one he harvested, one he nurtured to maturity every day since he last left like a house plant in a tiny plastic cup?

Yamaguchi flings himself onto Kei’s bed and Kei shuts the door behind them. His room is calm and exceptionally empty compared to the fullness of Kageyama’s house. Yamaguchi rolls to the edge of the bed and sits up. He watches Kei unbutton the cuffs of his blazer. Kei remembers the cufflinks his mother offered him this morning; a pair of his father’s. Shiny yet worn. He left them on his bathroom vanity and, upon finding them, Kei’s mother stowed them away somewhere. Kei could wear them, she suggested, if he wanted to be more formal. He decidedly did not. He imagines the soft clinking sound they would make as he set them on his desk if he said yes. But Kei would rather wear literal fire than anything that likens him to his father.

“It’s midnight,” Yamaguchi mentions.

“Four hours past your bedtime.”

“How am I even alive right now?” he wonders, words warped through a yawn.

“You ate like, four pieces of cake.”

“I’ve got a sugar high, Tsukki.”

“That’s a parenting myth.”

He shrugs. “Still. Four pieces—pretty impressive, huh?”

“Completely,” Kei promises.

Sleeve cuffs unfastened, he drops his arms. Yamaguchi lifts himself to his feet.

“Kei,” he sighs, and the small word greets the room like the answer to a question never asked.

He meets Kei at the door, pulls him down, and kisses him. Kei actually stumbles from its suddenness, a hollow sound resounding through the room as his elbow bumps the wall. Yamaguchi is urgent and quick like the first time they kissed. His mouth is insistent but pliable, lips soft against Kei’s. Yamaguchi’s hands are frantic. He presses fingertips into the nape of Kei’s neck, the backs of his shoulders, the dip in his throat. Kei hums. His skin buzzes with energy he can’t expel fast enough and yanks Yamaguchi’s shirt out from his pants to slide his hand up his back, warm skin on warmer skin. His elbow bumps the wall again. Yamaguchi swears and presses him fully against it, Kei’s back thumping against the flat surface.

The pressure is astounding; Yamaguchi’s chest on his with no space at his back to separate them, the push of his shoulder-blades against the wall just edging on painful, the fullness of Kei’s heart within his ribcage like it might pop each rung out of place at any moment. Yamaguchi is so _good_ , so tentative and slick that Kei can hardly keep up. His knees wobble under his weight. Yamaguchi sighs into his mouth, pulling back to place hurried kisses on Kei’s cheek, his jawbone, and his chin before coming back to his lips. Kei’s hand slips from his back. Cupping his jaw in his hands, Kei coaxes from him slower, deeper kisses that have Yamaguchi’s chest heaving. Yamaguchi fumbles with Kei’s glasses before he pushes them into his hair. Yamaguchi’s fingers do the same, smoothing tan digits through soft, blond strands.

Kei follows suit. He slides his hands up Yamaguchi’s jaw and digs his fingers into his hair. Yamaguchi pants as Kei slides his tongue into his mouth, slick, wet sounds clicking between them. Kei barely hears it all over his own heart, lodged in his throat with its rhythm bang, bang, banging in his eardrums. He tangles his hands in his hair and tips Yamaguchi’s head back. He leans over him and licks into his mouth, his glasses threatening to fall back onto his face. Yamaguchi shoves them up for him. His fingers curl around Kei’s forearm and they tremble when Kei tugs at his hair again, longer now than it was in winter. Even his breathing shakes, harsh and broken into Kei’s mouth. Another tug—Yamaguchi whimpers his name, the muscles in his stomach clenching where he's pressed against him.

“Missed this. So much,” Kei breathes, and Yamaguchi nods and nods.

For a moment, Kei considers where they might be if he lacked even the morsel of courage he has now. Would he have ever kissed Yamaguchi? Would he have spent forever waiting to be kissed not knowing Yamaguchi was doing the very same, sitting side by side with him on beds and floors and benches but still so far apart? Would someone else have had all the courage Kei lacked? Would they have kissed Yamaguchi like he couldn’t? Would they have needled their way into his life, into his house, into his mouth, the way Ghost Kid had? Would they get accepted to Yamaguchi’s first choice instead of his second? Would Yamaguchi have followed proudly, graduating with them, studying with them, moving in with them, and then what? Would Yamaguchi be at their house now instead of Kei’s? Would he have them against the wall with their hands in his hair?

The idea of it sends a jealous jolt through his arms, into his hands where his fingers pull harder at Yamaguchi’s hair. Yamaguchi flinches and whines again. Kei’s name. It’s always Kei’s name. Kei gulps down a jagged breath and flips them. That same hollow sound reverberates when Yamaguchi’s back hits the wall. He blinks up at Kei, his eyes big. All his blood has risen into his face. Color glares from his freckled skin. Blood roars in Kei’s ears. Yamaguchi is hot all up and down him, his chest and stomach firm, and Kei tightens his grip on whatever courage he might possess because he owes it absolutely, positively _everything_. 

Kei leans down and kisses him again, lingering this time. He mumbles his name against his mouth and Yamaguchi leans forward, once, twice, rocking steadily against him until Kei breaks their kiss because he needs to breathe. Yamaguchi cups his face as he pants. With bright eyes, he stares up at him.

“Still wanna taste my freckles?” he asks.

Kei nods.


	24. flashlight feeling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> even if you can't see it now, i'm proud of what's to come  
> and you.
> 
> \- just another face / modern baseball

He can’t remember the Latin name of the leaf that balances on Kei’s hand, broad and screaming with pigment against his pale palm. He can’t remember but it looks familiar. It looks familiar like maybe it’s something that grows near his house, in his front or backyard, or maybe Yamaguchi’s.

Yamaguchi’s shoes squelch as he walks ahead, still soaked from the creek.

“You think you can do that?” Kei asked in all sincerity.

“Tsukki, please. I have impeccable balance.”

“Just use the rocks.”

With one foot on the treacherous branch, Yamaguchi lilted, “Where's the fun in that?”

“Not falling in. Not soaking your shoes and making me carry them.”

Yamaguchi doesn’t make Kei carry them, his soaked shoes, but Kei does keep asking. He hates the squelch. It reminds him of thick gobs of mud stuck gracelessly to white soles, three inches thick like the kind they trudged through back when the trees were bare. They hadn’t anticipated the creek. Kei and Yamaguchi entered the woods from the opposite side this time, unwilling to return to school grounds just yet. They heard the creek bubbling from fifty feet in. It held captive the blue of the sky and cosmic bits of sparse, twinkling sunlight through the treetops overhead. 

“How far in are we going?”

“I don’t know.” _Squelch. Squ—elch._ “Until we find something cool.”

“So, through to the other side.”

_Squelch._ “Very funny.”

Kei still spies candy wrappers, broken tabs of soda cans, and cigarette butts, but they’re hidden now. They peek out from beneath wide, fallen leaves and bursts of thickets and shrubs. Nature has swept them away. The forest simply overgrows its flaws.

“Let me carry your shoes.”

“Look, I’m sorry about the squelching. I know you hate it. But you’re not carrying my shoes like I’m Cinderella.”

“You’re hardly Cinderella.”

Yamaguchi turns. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I don’t see Cinderella tiptoeing across a tree branch over a creek when there’s a perfectly good rock path, splashing into the water below, and yelling ‘fuck me’ into the woods so loud that it echoes.”

This time, it’s Yamaguchi’s barking laughter that echoes, bouncing through the tall trees.

“I really thought I could do it, Tsukki.”

“And I admire your confidence.”

“Really?” he implores, waiting for Kei to catch up.

“If I say yes, will you give me your shoes?”

He uses Kei’s shoulder as support as he peels them off. He offers up the pair with a smile.

“Want me to hold your leaf?” he asks.

“Yes.”

Kei trades his find for Yamaguchi’s sopping sneakers. They drip onto the bed of leaves below with faint tapping sounds. Yamaguchi nods at him and carries on, his lilac socks glaring wildly from the forest floor. They’re almost identical to the socks in Kei’s dresser drawer, but lack the lime green toe and heel. Maybe they came in the same pack. Kei stares at Yamaguchi’s back with a silent apology, suddenly guilty for leaving his things boxed up while everything else got put away. Yamaguchi walks softer than Kei now, no rubber soles crunching sticks and leaves, and Kei tries to walk lighter to match him. They’re too quiet now, sneaking through the forest like fugitives.

The trees on this side of the woods are still sparse, but not terribly. Their treetops trap out afternoon sunlight. Only speckles shine through trembling leaves. Bits of bright light scatter over the ground. Kei follows Yamaguchi to where sunshine pools: a clearing not far off, a spotlight shone directly into the ground like it marks something secret and exceptional. It makes Kei wish they had brought shovels. Yamaguchi chirps a laugh when he mentions it. 

“Let’s become treasure hunters.”

“Okay,” Kei replies.

“Maybe we’ll dig up a fortune. Then we can move away, into a mansion or something.”

“We’re already moving away for college. No fortune necessary.”

“Still,” says Yamaguchi, shrugging. “A fortune would be nice.”

Kei switches Yamaguchi’s sneakers to his opposite hand when his fingers start to prune. 

“Hey,” Yamaguchi calls, and Kei looks at him. “I’m really, really happy to be going with you. To school, I mean. I know it’s obvious, but I wanted to say it. Especially after all this stuff with our parents.” Yamaguchi steps into the clearing. Sunshine pours over the peaks of his face, accentuating the whites of his teeth, exposed with his grin. “I can’t wait to be on my own with you.”

Kei stares. He places a hand on his stomach. Full. He feels full. Bloated, even, and a little breathless like he’d run back to the creek and cupped the water in his hands, guzzling until it ran dry, exposing sunken beer cans and seaweed. His heart splashes around in his chest. A switch is flipped. Yamaguchi holds out his hand, bathed in canary yellow sunlight, and— _ker-chunk—_ the bright red sign inside Kei that always reads _vacant_ flips noisily to _occupied._

“I love you so much.”

Yamaguchi drops his hand. He whirls on his heel to face him.

“Are you—are you sure?” he blurts, rushing closer.

“I’m sure,” Kei breathes. He sways when Yamaguchi curls his hand around his forearm. “For the first time, maybe in my life, I don’t have any doubts.”

He slides his palm from his stomach to his chest to make sure, as if his doubts poke through his skin like splinters.

Yamaguchi’s dripping sneakers fall to the ground when he leaps into Kei. He wraps himself around him, clinging so tightly, his ear burning against Kei’s cheek. Kei shuts his eyes. He feels the warmth of sunlight on Yamaguchi’s face. Warm. Always warm. He pushes his hands against his back and, smashed together like this, Yamaguchi’s heartbeat hammers at both their chests. He slides his hand to the nape of Kei’s neck. His fingers curl over the collar of his shirt.

“I thought for sure I’d tell you first,” he manages, his voice thick and raw.

Kei points out, “You haven’t even told me second.”

Yamaguchi uncurls himself and grabs Kei’s face in his hands. Is it him or Kei that shakes?

“I love you back. I love you so much back,” Yamaguchi insists as he beams up at him. “Of course I do, Tsukki, it’s so obvious. Of course I do,” he repeats, and tips his nose up to nudge Kei’s. Kei lets out a breath.

“Thank god,” he sighs, leaning in. Yamaguchi laughs against his mouth.

The occupied feeling balloons and digs out even more room in Kei’s chest. Red muscles stretch to accommodate. They hollow out so much more room than Yamaguchi will ever need. So much room that Yamaguchi could climb inside and settle on his back, reaching out at five points like a star, the way he lies on his bed. 

The sun in the clearing is hot on their flushed skin. Summer is on spring’s heels. It sticks their t-shirts to their backs and when they head back, the shade doesn’t help. Their flushes are stubborn. Kei didn’t notice them before, but flowers drip from the tree branches overhead—lilacs, the same color as Yamaguchi’s socks. They litter the thicker trees like tinsel. Maybe they hadn't been there before at all. Maybe they sprouted and bloomed all in the time Kei and Yamaguchi spent in the clearing, flushing and confessing under the sun’s gracious spotlight.

They make it to the creek before remembering Yamaguchi’s shoes. They have to go back for them.

________________

  
Kei wishes he could see his house for the first time again; really see how beautiful it is, open and spacious, with clean lines and bright colors that catch fistfuls of natural light through enormous square windows. Instead, he is stuck only with the knowledge that it is beautiful without actually experiencing it. Like the way even the shiniest of coins rust over with time. Kei flips the gold penny in his hand, stopping only to grimace at the grit it leaves on his skin.

He wishes he could find his house beautiful like he did the toothpick house. But wouldn’t he have gotten used to its charm, too? The hardwood would lose its glossy sheen with too many footprints and the house’s whimsical, towering structure would become aggressive, stabbing angrily at the sky. Two coins, two rust stains on Kei’s palm. Maybe the toothpick house was never beautiful. Maybe it was just new.

“Our dormitory won’t have a balcony like this.”

Yamaguchi jiggles the knob but doesn’t go out. Kei lofts an eyebrow.

“Yes it will. We saw it on the website,” he says.

“Yeah, but not a _nice_ one like this.”

There are apartments on the edge of campus with nice balconies. But honestly, Kei would take a fenced-in backyard with a dilapidated awning for shelter over a crowded dormitory at the first chance. Someone else’s dishes in the sink. Someone else’s footprints on the carpet. Someone else’s food rotting in the fridge, ignoring Kei’s passive aggressive suggestions to tidy up. He could sequester himself and Yamaguchi in his room. They could only leave for food and class, like studious scavengers. They could be that weird couple their roommates never see but hear shuffling around the kitchen at night, the haunting glow of the refrigerator sneaking beneath their bedroom doors as they sleep.

They could say _fuck it_ and pay double to live in an apartment all on their own.

“Not a balcony we won’t have to share with six other people,” Yamaguchi goes on, and Kei groans. Yamaguchi lifts his arms, makes a box out of them. “I wish we could just, like, transplant this room right here onto campus.” He lifts the box, raising on his tiptoes, pivots, and sets it down as he drops to flat feet. “It would be perfect, Tsukki. I mean, what else would we need?”

“A bathroom,” Kei answers. “A kitchen.”

“Besides those.”

Yamaguchi plops down in Kei’s desk chair. Merrily, he spins. Kei folds another sock bundle and puts it with the others. 

“You’re very positive about all this,” he notes.

“Yeah, I’m excited.”

“I see that.”

Yamaguchi stops swiveling. “Aren’t you?”

“No. Yes. I just mean that it’s going to be difficult, too. We have to pack up all our stuff. Move out of our homes. Leave our families—Mom, your dad, your siblings. We have to get jobs.”

“I told you, Shimada-san is helping me find one. He’ll help you, too, if you let him.”

“We have to be around new people. Thousands of people, Yamaguchi. In an entirely new place.”

Kei slips a shirt onto a hanger and lifts it higher, smoothing his hand over any wrinkles. The desk chair squeaks. Yamaguchi pushes the hanger down to stare at him.

“It’s okay to be nervous,” he murmurs.

Kei lifts the hanger again, hiding him.

“You’re one to talk.”

Yamaguchi pushes it down again. “Yeah. That’s how I know it’s okay.”

His eyes are just gentle enough to file down the sharper edges of Kei’s poking anxiety. Kei turns and hangs the shirt in his closet. The plastic hanger clacks against the metal rod. Yamaguchi pleads with him not to think about it too much, to just let things happen, to let time take them through it like it always does and promises that they will work through whatever needs extra attention because after what they have been through, what they are _going_ through with his stepmom and Kei's dad, how much more difficult can anything else really be?

________________  
  


The television makes a racket over the crinkling of candy wrappers. Kei sorts them by brand and Yamaguchi doesn’t sort them at all, brandishing fistfuls each time he collects a dozen. The carcass of Yamaguchi’s schoolbag rests on the floor next to them. It slumps without its bones—notebooks, textbooks, pens and pencils, all poured onto the carpet between them. But mostly candy wrappers.

“I don’t even like these that much,” Yamaguchi insists.

He opens his fist and a dozen shiny gold wrappers flutter to the carpet. Kei hums.

“Apparently you do. Or I do, because all these make thirty-six.”

“Holy shit.”

“Seventy-three in total.”

Yamaguchi crunches a blue foil wrapper between his palms. “It’s kind of amazing our teeth haven’t rotted out of our heads. Especially yours, Kei,” he says. His eyes scan Kei’s array of flattened wrappers, all neat and tidy. “With all your gum and cough drops and stuff. We’re pretty lucky.”

“You’re an enabler,” Kei tells him.

“I can’t help it.”

“Didn’t we just do this a couple months ago?”

“Candy trash builds up quickly with us, Tsukki. It’s no joke.”

A television studio audience roars with laughter. Kei splays his hands.

“Here. I’ll throw them away.”

With effort, Yamaguchi piles the papers, foils, and cartons into Kei’s hands. They crunch and crinkle as he drops them in the kitchen wastebasket. The wrappers unfold and expand in the bin, the paper-and-foil mound rising like bread dough. The sheer amount is alarming. Kei tongues at his teeth. He checks for holes, cracks, and fissures, grateful when he finds none.

“Hey. I was thinking about something.”

“What?” Kei asks.

The wrappers left a sticky residue on his hands. He runs the tap.

“Your mom isn’t home, is she?”

“No. Is that what you were thinking about?”

“No, no.” Yamaguchi busies himself on the carpet. “I was thinking how we’re going to school together, how we know that for certain now, and how, you know, we love each other.” He tugs a wrapper he’d overlooked from beneath a notebook and shoves it into his backpack. He pulls the zipper shut. “I know we talked about the dorms just the other day, and we looked at all those pictures, and you were kind of freaking out.”

“I wasn’t freaking out.”

“Kei, you were.”

“I was n—”

“And I know you weren’t really serious about that thing you said before graduation.”

Kei dries his hands on a dish towel. “What thing?”

“About me moving in with you.”

The television cheers. Kei crosses the room. He sits on his knees in front of Yamaguchi, listening. He swallows hard as his heart lunges into his throat. Yamaguchi stacks his notebooks on top of one another and messes with the spiral bindings, hooking his finger into the coils, his stare darting over Kei’s shoulder when the television hollers some more.

“I do want to live with you, though,” Yamaguchi tells him, his stare darting back.

“Oh,” Kei replies dumbly.

“But I don’t want to live with your mom.”

“I can’t exactly kick her out, Yamaguchi.”

Yamaguchi rolls his eyes. He smiles up at Kei in earnest, dimples creasing his face.

“In the _fall,_ ” he insists, “at school. Not in some dorm, either. I was thinking—an apartment.”

“Well, yeah.”

“I know it’s more expensive but I talked to Dad and he said he would help us all he can if we need it at first, then we’ll have jobs too, just think about it, Tsukki, I mean, our own—wait a sec.” Yamaguchi backtracks, pressing a rewind button in his head. He blinks fast. “What?”

Kei’s palms are damp again. He smoothes them down his jeans.

“It makes sense. Us living together,” he answers, still smoothing. “It’s financially smart.”

Yamaguchi practically twitches.

“You—you thought about this already?”

Kei shrugs. “Yes.”

“Kei, oh my god. You can’t just think about things like that and not tell me, oh my god, Kei, you have to say them out loud! For me to hear! With my ears!” Manic, Yamaguchi points to the sides of his head like Kei won’t get it unless he does. “I mean, it’s not like we’re going out for brunch. That’s—that’s like, an official thing. It’s so official that it requires _paperwork_. And a _deposit._ ”

“Since when do you like brunch?”

Yamaguchi stares. “I don’t think you get how big this is.”

“No. I do.”

Kei grins. He grins so wide his glasses shift on his face. Yamaguchi goes red at the sight of it but he beams, too, statued stiffness leaking from his shoulders. He springs forward. He barrels into Kei’s chest and then they’re flat on the carpet, his chin digging into Kei’s sternum. He puffs short breaths over his neck.

“That flashlight feeling is back,” he pants. His chin digs into Kei some more.

An infomercial shouts at them, loud and insistent with a bunch of close ups and quick, informative cuts. Kei should have turned the television off. The muscles in his legs protest the awkward stretch but his grin stays, aimed at the flat white of the living room ceiling. Will their apartment ceiling be just as dreary? Will their cheap rent allow for yellow water stains and deep, concerning cracks? Will they be on the top floor or will others live above them, waking Kei and Yamaguchi in their bed at odd hours of the night with all their stomping around?

Their bed. Their cheap rent. Their apartment.

“You know,” says Yamaguchi, and Kei feels the drone of his vocals on his chest. “I don’t wanna live with you just because it’s _financially smart_.”

Kei gives his back a solid pat. “Why, then?”

“Because I want to grow with you. Be with you. Cook with you and wake up with you.”

“But I’m dull. I’m brooding.”

“You’re comfortable. You’re introspective.”

“I am deeply defective,” Kei adds.

“Well, so am I.”

Warmth sits in his chest. Somebody’s dropped a red coal into his ribcage. He sees Yamaguchi slipping in through his mouth when they kiss and moving parts of him around. Leaving them the same but brushing off spiderwebs with the side of his hand and simply moving things, rearranging them; essential parts of Kei that keep his spark lit and crackling. Stacking them on top of each other to make more room. Unboxing them, finding new parts stashed inside.

Yamaguchi sits back and pulls Kei up with him. His knees creak; eighty-year-old joints encased in eighteen-year-old skin. Yamaguchi leans forward. He leans onto his hands, palms warm on Kei’s thighs. Kei brings a hand to his jaw. Yamaguchi closes his eyes. He leans his face into the touch and Kei can not wait to grow with him, to be with him, to cook with him and wake up with him. He avows it to Yamaguchi in a whisper. Yamaguchi squeezes his eyes shut like he brings every bit of his focus to his ears, willing his heartbeat to quiet for just a minute so he can listen, really listen, his face red in Kei’s hand, Kei’s words gentle in his eardrums.

Without a sound, a ladder drops into the well. They climb out.

________________

  
“Money,” Kei answers, shoving the giant envelope to the other side of his desk.

He shoves it further when it still feels too close. Akiteru’s cough crackles over phone lines.

“Well, how much?” he asks.

“Same as last time.”

“A lot, then.”

Kei drops his chin in his hand. “What do I do?”

“Keep it,” insists his brother.

“I don’t want it. I don’t want anything from him.”

“Yeah,” Akiteru agrees, and there’s a shuffling sound as he nods. Kei sees him in his tiny living room, the television remote in his hand. His finger is poised idly over the power button because Kei called just before he went to press it. His brother slumps deeper into his couch. “I get it. He’s such a douche.”

“A douche?” Kei parrots. “Are you fifteen?”

“A fucking asshole, then.”

He pauses. Akiteru never says _fuck._

“I wish there was a way I could detach it from him,” Kei admits, reaching across his desk. He presses his finger into the corner of the envelope and then recoils. It’s sharper than he imagined.

The first of many envelopes came the day he graduated. Kei didn’t recognize the return address. It gathered dust for days on the kitchen counter, waiting to be remembered. It didn’t come to Kei in a dream. His eyes didn’t fly open at midnight in some kind of nocturnal epiphany. Instead, he woke up knowing. He woke up remembering. He woke up before the sun and he just knew: the toothpick house. The envelope came from the toothpick house. It was the same instantaneous, instinctual knowledge of being hungry or tired. He just knew.

The cold marble of the kitchen froze his feet as he stared. He turned the envelope in his hands. It had weight. It was hefty. Kei left all the lights off, letting darkness drip in every room except for the kitchen with its bright white chandelier, like a spotlight. He sat under it, right on the floor. He tore the envelope open. He tipped it over and note after crisp note spilled out over the marble, like Kei had partaken in some great crime and finally received his share. No letter. No card. Kei fanned the money on the floor and stared between stacks. He yawned.

But a part of him ached. A small, loose part in the bottom of his chest, almost in his stomach. He doubled over and ached. He ached for himself, for his indecision and sleeplessness. But mostly, he ached for his father. Because he really, truly believed this is what would project him back into his son’s life. Kei ached because eighteen years, eighteen goddamn years, and his father still doesn’t know him at all. Did he ever, really? Was the money Hana’s idea? Had she stood over Kei’s father as he thumbed through the paper stacks, double-checking their amounts? Did she get irritated by the way he counted aloud, the way Kei’s mother always had? Or did she count too, pressing him to add more for her Tadashi, too chickenshit to send her own? Did Kei’s father ever know him, really? Did Yamaguchi’s stepmother ever know him?

Kei shoves the envelope again and it slips off the desk, plunging to the floor.

“Akiteru,” he croaks.

“What? Are you okay?”

“How did you sleep?” Kei clears his throat. “Last time you were here, I mean. In your room.”

The line wobbles and he imagines his brother sitting up straighter, switching the phone to his other ear as he answers, “Good. Great, even.” He switches ears again. “When I, uh—when I think about it, I feel dumb for making such a big deal about it the first time.”

“Don’t.”

“Maybe I was just zonked from the party. Tadashi’s grandma talked to me for thirty minutes.”

Kei breathes a laugh into the receiver. Akiteru snorts back.

“She talked to me for forty,” Kei tells him. “I win.”

“She kissed my cheek.”

“She kissed both of my cheeks and told me that’s how they do it in the Middle East. I still win.”

“Shoot,” says Akiteru.

“I need a favor,” Kei says back.

“I love how casually you slipped that in there.”

“I want you to come with me to take my driving test. I was going to ask Mom,” he admits, staring at his desk and sketching the grain of the wood with his fingernail, “but you helped me the most. So I was wondering if you would take me instead. If you want.”

A momentary crackle, and Akiteru exhales.

“Of course I’ll come with you, Kei. This is _so_ exciting,” he insists. Kei imagines him bent over his phone, cramming his enthusiasm into the receiver. “You’re almost a real, functioning adult human.”

“Hardly. But I need another favor before that.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to drive Yamaguchi and I to Tohoku. Please,” Kei says.

“Around campus?” Akiteru asks, shuffling around. “Already?”

Kei’s fingertip traces over the desktop—Yamaguchi’s name.

“We want to look for an apartment.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can't believe this is ending soon. dunno what i'll do with myself but i'm so grateful for your guys' comments and kudos :')
> 
> and if you want you can listen to the [tctwl 8tracks playlist](https://8tracks.com/deanpendragon/the-certain-things-we-lack) i made.


	25. spring, summer, fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can't believe there's only one chapter left, rip me. i really appreciate comments and kudos! <3

Kei’s conversation with his mother is brief. It’s a basement conversation. She works throughout it, pressing thumbprints into soft, cool clay and smoothing down uneven edges but Kei prefers it this way, prefers to have her eyes off him when he tells her; doesn’t want to see the _I know_ in her stare when he mentions their double bed, doesn’t want her to see the _I love him_ in his when he mentions Yamaguchi. Kei watches the shapeless clay and estimates just how much of him and his mother it accumulates. How much of their conversation sticks to its gummy surface in the form of moisture and molecules? How many microscopic flecks of her skin hang back when she takes her fingers away? How many flecks of Kei’s skin are held captive when he leans in and helps?

“Will you move?” he wonders slowly. “When I leave?”

Something smaller, maybe. Something with less room to fill. He hadn’t considered it; his mother and Yamaguchi’s father, left alone in these houses meant for families. It shouldn’t be like that. These houses should be loud and dynamic. The floors should creak under a dozen swift feet and doors should slam excitedly shut at the end of every hallway, the way Yamaguchi’s house is. The way Yamaguchi’s house used to be. The way Yamaguchi’s house will be, at least on alternating weeks. It’s like Hana has hit the mute button.

“No, your mother has worked too hard for this house.”

“Oh. Yeah.” His mother’s expert hands smooth every bump in the clay. Kei goes back over them to appear as if he’s actually helping. “Won’t it be too quiet?” he asks as if his presence alone is any more than the occasional cough or soft sound of the refrigerator door.

“Maybe.”

“Won’t that bother you?”

His mother looks up from her creation. Her gold eyes glimmer.

“Maybe I’ll get my own record player,” she muses.

Kei laughs. He laughs far too loud for the tiny basement, embarrassed at the way it bounces back at him from vases and glazed dinnerware. His mother’s chuckle is weak in comparison. The playful glimmer ricochets around her irises that look just like his and Kei realizes that he actually likes his mother despite loving her, in the way it’s easy to love ones’ parents but nearly impossible to like them. It was his father that made him resent his mother. Realizations like this always come far too late. His father clung to her, parasitic. He was a parasite. And without him, she will finally flourish.

“Tell me how much you need,” she says, “and I’ll cover it.”

“Cover what?”

She peels the clay, egg-like in its ovality, from the table. “Your deposit and the first couple months of rent. Until you get on your feet.”

“Mom, you don’t—”

“Your father and I did the same thing for your brother. How else would you pay your half?”

Kei didn’t anticipate the flush on his face. His mother turns on the kiln, adding heat. It beeps as she adjusts its settings. Kei never connected the sounds of the basement with money. He never linked the heat of the kiln with a paycheck. He never realized the relation between his mother’s clay-caked hands and the security of the walls around him.

“Thanks,” he breathes. He feels his shirt sticking to his back. “I’ll let you know.”

“Good. Help me with these, Kei.”

They prop a stack of kiln shelves up against the wall.

________________

  
Yamaguchi is breathless when Kei tells him, and then he hyperventilates. Two showings this weekend, one the next. Cheap rents, walkability, enough room for a double bed. Yamaguchi turns bright red and whisper-shouts because everyone is asleep. He pats excited hands on Kei’s shoulders and clambers into his lap and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, slow and devout, celebratory and wet. His content wafts thickly off him, bending the air around them like the lit wick of a candle. He almost cries, almost, until Kei tells him he can’t be hard and crying at the same time. Then he laughs instead.

Yamaguchi presses his hands to Kei’s chest until they’re horizontal. His bangs hang off his forehead. Kei sighs at the press of his thighs around his hips, the glint in his downcast stare, the shifting of his weight on his groin as he settles. Kei loves how gravity treats them—so fairly with this pressure it allows Yamaguchi to give him, so tangible and warm. It’s been weeks since he sat on him like this.

“Is my door locked?” Yamaguchi wonders.

“I locked it.”

“Hey, think about it,” he chirps. He tugs at the collar of Kei’s shirt. “We won’t have to say that anymore in an apartment. Well, we will, but not like that. You know.”

Kei drums his fingers on Yamaguchi’s leg. “Yeah. I know.”

Yamaguchi yanks his shirt up and places a kiss on his bare chest. The very center, between Kei's lungs. He moves up and mouths at his jawbone. He kisses tentatively up the curve. His hand comes to lie where he kissed, his palm warm on Kei’s chest as Kei puffs a breath into his cheek.

“Can you feel my heart?” he murmurs.

Yamaguchi nods. His nose nudges the shell of Kei’s ear.

“Bump. Bump. Bump,” he reports.

“Weird.”

“It would be weirder if I didn’t feel it, Tsukki.”

Kei huffs a laugh. Yamaguchi pulls back to grin at him, sitting up again, shifting his weight.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” Yamaguchi admits. He shifts his weight again and Kei wants to tell him not to if he wants to talk because Kei’s head is already fuzzy, rolling like television static. Yamaguchi pulls Kei’s shirt back over his stomach. He smoothes the puckers with his hand and says, “About how we’re gonna be with each other twenty-four-seven. Which, finally. So I was thinking that maybe we could—we could get closer.”

Kei lifts onto his elbows. “Like this?”

“No. I mean, like—”

The mattress creaks when Kei pushes up on his hands, sitting up to meet him.

“How about this?”

“Tsukki,” Yamaguchi sighs. It fogs Kei’s glasses.

“Too close?”

“I meant intimately. Closer intimately.”

Kei’s head goes blank—only for a moment until everything floods back in, full throttle.

“You want to have sex?” he blurts. “With _me_?”

“Oh my god, why do you say it like that?” Yamaguchi pushes his hand to Kei’s chest again and balks. Carefully, he implores, “I just mean, like, is there something you want to do? Something more?”

“Apparently there’s something you want to do.”

“Yeah, but I asked you first.”

Kei’s heart runs laps around his ribcage, heaving layers of surrounding skin and muscle with it. The ceiling fan whirs and clicks over their heads. Kei wishes he could turn it off because he can’t think, it’s hard to think, it’s hard to think until it isn’t. He throws out his arms and gathers all the things about Yamaguchi he craves, endlessly, desperately. But he can’t hold them all at once and some slip through the gaps.

His tongue traces his teeth because what Kei wants most is for Yamaguchi to slip inside him—to make love to him—to lean over him with all his weight, his smooth, tan skin burning against Kei’s as he slides into him and his face goes slack because Kei is so tight, so warm inside, and so _his_ and only his, first and last, this time and the next, with his sweet voice turning husky the more he groans above him and his brown hair in his face, stringy from sweat, repeating Kei’s name between praises and swears until he comes harder than he ever has, taking Kei over to edge too with his hand trembling around him. But the thought is too huge to verbalize. He’d choke on the words. He’ll tell Yamaguchi eventually, after he swallows the swell in his throat.

Yamaguchi catapults Kei from his head. 

“It’s fine if there isn’t anything, you know. It’s fine,” he says again.

“Stop,” Kei murmurs, yanking him from his needless doubt. Kei’s silences are not built from lack of _something_ , but instead an abundance of _everything_ , and what takes him longest is simply to narrow it all down to one. “Fingering you, maybe.”

A carbonated spark swoops through him and his dick twitches at the words. A reply expires in Yamaguchi’s throat. His mouth opens, closes. Opens, closes. He shifts a little on top of him and Kei knows he’s firmed up, too, he _feels_ it, warm and dense on his lap before Yamaguchi settles. The bed squeaks again.

“ _Yes,_ ” Yamaguchi hisses finally. “I think about that. Like, a lot.”

“Really?”

“You really have to ask that?”

Kei mutters, “No, it’s just…so do I.”

“Do you want to now?”

His voice is caught in his lungs. He doesn’t know how to tell Yamaguchi what this means to him, how he isn’t sure where to start because he has never done it himself, just never had the mind to try, and how now he wishes he had so he could be better for him. Kei’s fingers twitch. His teeth trap his bottom lip.

“Hey,” says Yamaguchi. “We don’t have to now. Sorry, Tsukki, I just got excited.”

“No—Yamaguchi, I want to,” Kei manages. “I want to feel you around me. I want to make you come like—like that.”

Yamaguchi stares at him for a beat.

“I think I just did,” he answers.

Kei rolls his eyes. He flicks Yamaguchi’s shoulder and Yamaguchi flicks back but the air in the room has changed; it’s charged now, and it crackles with electricity. It vibrates over Kei’s skin. It puts a tremble in Yamaguchi’s lower lip. He wets it with his tongue and Kei glances from his mouth to his hand, heavy on Yamaguchi’s shoulder. Yamaguchi curls his fingers around his wrist. He shuffles backward off his lap and tugs Kei around so they swap places. The fan churns the electric air.

Kei crawls between his legs. He feels the heat of him on his knees, his thighs. Yamaguchi crowds him closer. He kisses the dip in his throat. He licks and soothes until Kei is fire red, panting into Yamaguchi’s hair, leaning down over him when Yamaguchi lies back. It’s new. Kei is usually beneath him, loving his weight, slight but substantial. He lowers himself. Their chests press together and Yamaguchi arches up against him. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end; Yamaguchi’s groin pushes into his abdomen.

“Mm,” Kei hums.

“Yeah,” Yamaguchi drawls, fogging up his glasses a second time.

Yamaguchi arches again to let Kei pull his shirt off. Kei presses his palm over his navel, over the ring of freckles there. His hand rises, falls, rises, falls with Yamaguchi’s breathing. Yamaguchi cranes his neck and kisses him. He tilts his head to open Kei’s mouth further, kissing him deeper, and Kei shudders with how slippery his mouth is, the easy slide of Yamaguchi’s tongue alongside his. He feels himself growing. He always gets hard when Yamaguchi kisses like this. Yamaguchi anchors a hand on his back and shuffles lower. He gasps, head tilting up and out of their kiss when Kei humps into him. Kei begs himself to do it again, again, again—rocking into Yamaguchi until he comes because it’s so, so good. It’s so good like that. But he doesn’t. He takes a breath, sits back on his knees.

He curls his fingers over the waistband of Yamaguchi’s pants. Yamaguchi hums his enthusiasm. He lifts his hips dutifully and Kei pulls them down, over his knees and off. He makes a soft sound when the elastic of Yamaguchi’s boxers snags a sharp hipbone. Kei grips his knee. For one thoughtless moment, he searches Yamaguchi’s body for scars from the crash that killed his mother—scars from sharpened steel, cuts from broken glass, abrasions from burning asphalt—faded after thirteen years but surely still visible, except he wasn’t there, Kei knows he wasn’t there, and his skin reflects that. 

Tawny, smooth, almost golden in the lamplight. Summer skin with thick heels and calloused palms from being lived in year-round. Splattered with liquid bronze. His face, his chest, his shoulders. Blessed by shapes and pigment. Kei is pale all over, bitter like autumn. But at least they touch, summer and fall, and Kei soaks up his warmth as Yamaguchi fades into him.

Yamaguchi turns onto his side, sifting through the clutter on his nightstand. He shoves a cool bottle into Kei’s hand.

“Where did you get this?” Kei wonders, eyeing it.

“Shimada Mart,” Yamaguchi tells him.

“He sells _lube_?”

“I mean, I don’t think he sells it with this intent, Tsukki.”

Yamaguchi stares up at Kei from the bed. His hips stir with a sudden, compulsive twitch.

“What?” asks Kei.

“Nothing, it’s just—seeing you with it.”

The bottle is half-empty. Kei’s heartbeat mounts, climbing into his ears. He snaps off the cap. Kei stares past it, transfixed by the jut of Yamaguchi’s hip, still poking at the waistband of his boxers. Yamaguchi shoves them down for him. The head of his dick is so pink. Dots of precum leak from the tip.  
  
“Yamaguchi,” Kei sighs. He drags his fingertips down the length of it.

“Tsukki, ah,” stammers Yamaguchi.

He tries to arch up into his touch but Kei takes it away. The small bottle gains weight in his hand. It’s easy to coat his fingers with the lube and it’s cool on his skin, thinner and pouring out quicker than Kei imagined. He recaps the bottle with a pop and it’s the last thing he hears before his heartbeat devours him. It pounds in his ears, once, twice, three times, four, and on as Yamaguchi looks up at him and says soft, simple words Kei can’t even hear.

“I’m nervous,” he admits.

It’s like a valve that empties his heart from his eardrums.

Yamaguchi leans up on his elbows. “About what?”

“I don’t want to let you down.”

He watches Kei for a moment. Kei watches the bedspread and hates himself for getting stopped short by his insecurities, again, again, fucking again, screeching to a halt as soon as he gains momentum. Lube drips from his fingers and onto the bedspread.

“Let me down?” Yamaguchi reiterates.

Kei nods. Yamaguchi wraps a hand around his arm and squeezes.

“Kei, hello. It’s _me._ You can’t let me down. I love you. I’m blinded by love, see?” Yamaguchi covers his eyes. He splays his fingers, one copper eye peeking through tan digits. “I’m also naked. And cold.” He drops his hand when Kei sputters. The valve turns again. Kei’s heart crawls back down his throat, dropping comfortably into his chest.

“You are wonderful and lame,” he tells Yamaguchi.

“Yeah, Tsukki.”

“I love you back.”

“Don’t be nervous. It’s me,” Yamaguchi promises.

Kei nods. He leans over him and kisses him with hardly any pressure at all, soft and gentle, their mouths like a whisper. Yamaguchi’s hands sweep his chest. Kei sits up again. Another pop and Kei replaces the lube that dripped off his fingers. He grips Yamaguchi’s knee. The insides of his thighs are so smooth, so bare. No freckles. Precum drips from the head of his cock when Kei slides his fingers down, down from the base of his balls to his entrance. Warm. No, hot. Tight. Yamaguchi gasps. Muscles tighten beneath Kei’s fingertips.

“Okay,” he says to himself.

Yamaguchi breathes his name back to him. Kei glances up at him, his eyes, eyelids fluttering like they beg to close but he won’t let them. Red splotches paint his skin. Kei’s face heats up when he notices them like maybe they’re contagious, transferring to Kei through their points of contact: his hand gripping Yamaguchi’s knee, the soft inside of Yamaguchi’s thigh pressed to his hip, the pad of Kei’s middle finger as he pushes the digit into him, nice and slow. Yamaguchi’s body sinks into the mattress. No—he melts. He melts into the bed, hot around Kei’s finger, muscles stretching and slippery from lubrication.

Kei pushes his finger in deeper. He curls his other fingers down and pushes steadily as far in as he can. He shuts his eyes and concentrates on the way Yamaguchi stretches around him. When he can’t push anymore, Kei waits. He counts. He counts with Yamaguchi’s shallow breathing and at twelve, he bends his middle finger slightly at the knuckle. A soft sound pushes from his throat. Yamaguchi heaves a sigh, shifting his body and with it, Kei’s finger stretches him further.

“Oh,” Yamaguchi chokes out. Another sound pushes from Kei’s throat and he realizes they should have done this when they were alone in the house because he doesn’t want to worry about needing to shut the fuck up. Yamaguchi squirms around his finger. “It feels so different than when I do it myself.”

Kei slides his finger out. He coats it with lube again and slips back inside, slicker this time.

“Is it okay?” he asks.

“Mhm,” hums Yamaguchi. His fingers twist into the bedspread by his hip. They untwist just as quickly and he spins his palm over the fabric, restless. “You can go quicker, Tsukki. Or do two,” he offers.

Kei pauses for a second. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I do—” Yamaguchi stops and sucks in a breath when Kei bends his finger inside him, then slips out only to slide leisurely back in. A shudder rolls through him. Sparks fly off his skin, pop in the air between them. “I do this—I do this a lot. I’ll be fine. Just want more of you, Kei.”

Kei swears. Yamaguchi is slick enough to easily allow his index finger inside, slow at first although every vein in Kei’s body pulses, urging him to go quicker, faster, more, now. In as deep as they can go, Kei shifts his fingers. He pulls them out and slips in again, out, in again, and each time he goes faster, Yamaguchi loses a little more composure. His cock twitches along with his hands. His breathing can’t find a rhythm. Kei’s own dick presses against the fabric of his shorts and he shuffles forward. Yamaguchi lifts his hips as he does, bending a leg over his waist, shoving in closer to him with his heel at Kei’s lower back.

“Ngh, baby,” he whispers, feeling more with the new angle.

Kei’s pace quickens with the encouragement. Yamaguchi pants as his fingers grope and press at the inside of him. A slick, wet sound gurgles through the room each time Kei pushes back in and soon after, sharp inhalations from Yamaguchi, harsher by the minute. The muscles in Kei’s forearm burn. His cock pulses again and he wants so badly to jut his hips forward or maybe to the side to press against the soft caramel inside of Yamaguchi’s thigh and have it tremble against his straining erection.

His eyes stop watching his fingers long enough to slide up Yamaguchi’s front. His chest heaves. His shoulders twitch. His cheeks are hollow from the way his mouth hangs open. His cock, hard and leaking, bobs on his stomach in time with the push of Kei’s fingers. His hand grips Kei’s on his knee, blunt fingernails digging into him while the other tugs helplessly at the bedspread. He lets go of the sheet and drags his forearm over his forehead, swiping his bangs to the side. His eyes squeeze harder shut when Kei murmurs his name.

Ordinarily, Yamaguchi is cute, even handsome, but right now—his breath shaking from his throat, a ruby flush pooling in his cheeks, the muscles in his stomach clenching beneath taught, tan skin—he’s _hot_ , and Kei’s heart bangs around in his ribcage, his hands suddenly shaky. His lenses blur from the heat on his face. Maybe they blurred minutes ago and Kei hadn’t even noticed.

Yamaguchi taps at Kei’s hand on his knee, arching up to look at him.

“You okay?” he pants.

“Yeah,” Kei answers, his voice raspy. “I’ve just never—I’ve never seen you like this.” Sure, he has seen Yamaguchi writhe, seen him slack-jawed and panting, seen him gasp and twitch. But never like this. He hasn’t seen him like this, shaking beneath him, clenching around his fingers, each and every muscle in his body sizzling, bringing blood to the surface. “Yamaguchi, you look so—so good.”

“Feels so good, fuck,” Yamaguchi whimpers. His body arches into the hand Kei wraps around his cock. It’s hard to coordinate the slip of his fingers inside him and the rhythm around his dick, wet with sticky, pearly precum. “Kei, Kei, I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come, _faster_.”

Kei drives his fingers into him, his hips jutting forward too, searching for friction he doesn’t get. His fingers thrust shortly, quickly, hardly drawing back before he shoves into Yamaguchi again. He draws half-circles below the head of Yamaguchi’s dick with his thumb. Wet, hot, fast. Kei is going to come in his pants. His skin buzzes. His head feels thick, dense. He pumps his hand around Yamaguchi’s dick from root to tip, hard, and Yamaguchi’s voice breaks in a moan, muffled by his forearm as his body jerks and arches. 

The electric air around them pops and crackles as Yamaguchi spills over his stomach, and some over Kei’s hand as it slows. Kei waits until Yamaguchi’s eyes flutter open to draw his fingers out of him. Yamaguchi stares up at him, then. Kei loves him. His wrist is sore, his fingers aching when he bends them. His heart beats in his fingertips. He rests them on Yamaguchi’s chest. Can he feel it? Or does his own heartbeat eclipse the feeling totally?

Over the rampant rhythms, Yamaguchi tells Kei to kiss him. Kei leans down. Their mouths are tired, lazy. Morning kisses in the middle of the night. Kei jolts when Yamaguchi slips his hand down his pants. The button and zipper are afterthoughts; Yamaguchi unfastens them with one hand while his other lifts Kei from his boxers, dismissing muggy fabric.

“So damp,” he breathes. “Kei, you did so good.”

“Please,” Kei begs. “Tadashi.”

Yamaguchi hooks his arm around Kei’s neck. He pulls him close so he can pant into his ear while he lets Kei fuck his fist. The thickness in Kei’s head expands. His fingers lose the warmth they built up while inside Yamaguchi, or maybe they don’t and Kei just can’t feel them anymore. They tremble on the bed, twisted into the covers on either side of Yamaguchi as he holds himself up. Sparks skitter across fire-red skin. The bed squeaks steadily now, nothing that can be heard beyond the door but loud enough that the sound infiltrates Kei’s head for a moment until he comes, thrusting into Yamaguchi’s hand, and it’s cancelled out— _everything_ is cancelled out—except the beat of his heart in his throat and Yamaguchi’s warm, humid breath in his ear.


	26. home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whatever i lack, you make up.
> 
> \- for him. / troye sivan

Kei bleeds. Kei punctures and collapses. He folds and withers and jabs but Yamaguchi stays soft, smooth and velvety like a petal, even around such sharp, broken things: the ocarina that sits shattered on his desk, his parents’ crumbling marriage, Hana’s new edge, Kei’s cracked bedroom window, Kei himself. It’s not to say that Yamaguchi hasn’t grown his share of thorns. Sometimes Kei imagines they were once his and not Yamaguchi’s at all, simply transferring from one to the other when their arms brushed in passing, like burrs. Sometimes Kei imagines he’s lethal like that. Other times, he figures just the opposite; he was all thorns once, until Yamaguchi. Now he’s all petals. Just shriveled and scarred and a little pathetic. But still petals.

“Dad got Fumika this book,” Yamaguchi tells him, toeing at the weathered wood, inviting splinters.

“A book?”

Yamaguchi nods. “He said he’d walk them all through it, you know, read it with them and stuff. But he wanted to read it with her first. I’m not sure why, I mean, Misashi’s oldest.”

He taps his fingers on the railing. The ocarina isn’t on his desk anymore, Kei remembers arbitrarily. It’s in Yamaguchi’s backpack. It’s bundled in a dish towel he said his father won’t miss and tucked into the deepest corner of his backpack to keep it safe in transit despite the fact that it’s already so, so broken.

“Apparently it helps kids deal with divorce. The change and everything.”

“It helps them deal with it?” Kei asks. “Or understand it?”

“Both, I think. I told Dad he should’ve gotten me and Tsuru a book like that, like, joking with him, but he just looked sad. It was so stupid. I shouldn’t have.”

Yamaguchi shakes his head. Just a slight back and forth, like the breeze itself had done it. The back door of the house behind Kei’s slides open and he and Yamaguchi watch his neighbor plod across her lawn. A watering can swings from her pudgy hand.

“It made me think,” Yamaguchi goes on, “like, some peoples’ stepparents aren’t like mine was, you know? They aren’t the way Hana was with us. Even me and Tsuru, knowing us from when we were Isao’s age. To some kids, their stepparent is just some lady who hooked up with their dad. Or just some lonely guy who proposed to their mom. It’s _weird_. Hana was always so much more than that to me.”

Kei clings onto his past tense. This is what they do now; talk about their parents like they’re dead.

“I was thinking that maybe it would have been better if she was someone like that. I wish she was someone like that,” Yamaguchi finishes, turning to look at Kei. “Just some lady who met Dad and married him. It would have been easier, I think, in the long run.”

Kei’s neighbor trudges to the other side of her lawn, her arm outstretched, watering things.

“Do you actually wish that?” Kei wonders, facing him.

Yamaguchi unfurls his fingers. They tap at the railing again. Neither of the apartments they were shown had balconies, so Kei and Yamaguchi make a point to use Kei’s while they can, welcoming splinters from the worn wood, squeezing out every bit of it they had neglected over the past eight years.

“No,” Yamaguchi decides, leaning into the railing. “What kind of brother would I be?”

Kei watches him for a moment. His eyes catch the colors of the late afternoon sky; soft pinks and creams and oranges. Summer colors. Petal colors. Kei’s hand finds Yamaguchi’s far shoulder, urges him closer. The wood creaks under slight footsteps.

“Have we met our balcony quota yet?” he asks.

A smile breaks over Yamaguchi’s lips.

“Yeah,” he answers. “Just barely, Tsukki.”

________________

  
His father’s final envelope arrives on a Friday, and Kei has no fucking clue how the last eight he sent back hadn’t gotten his message across. He imagines his father bent over his giant desk at the toothpick house, shoving wads of cash into brown envelopes and frantically scrawling Kei’s name on their fronts, cursing and slamming his heavy, expensive pen on the desk when it skids and skips, fresh out of ink. He sees him rifling through his drawer for another with one hand while the other flips swiftly through his daybook, shaky from his most recent caffeine intake.

“Do I have the right address? Do I have the right goddamn address?” his father might mumble to himself in the half-light, his memory blurred by ecstasy for his new life, the only address floating to the forefront of his mind the toothpick house’s or maybe Yamaguchi’s, where he found himself on so many shadowed nights.

Maybe Kei should have been more artful in returning the envelopes after all. Maybe he should have written _fuck you_ on the front of every single one of them in large, sloping letters. Maybe Kei shouldn’t have given them back at all. Maybe Kei should have kept them stacked somewhere in his closet to grow mold and spiderwebs. At least that way no one would get them. He should have buried them in the backyard. He should have given them to his mother.

“This was on your porch. It was leaning against your front door,” Kageyama tells him, tossing the ninth envelope onto Kei’s bed. He drops himself onto the desk chair. “It’s heavy.”

“Fuck’s sake.”

On the porch. What would Kei have done if he saw his father’s car roll up the street, slowing to a stop outside his house? How would he have felt to see his father sneak onto the porch under the cover of evening? How would it have felt to watch him look over his shoulder in secrecy before planting the envelope, maybe staring at it for a moment, glancing up at the house itself that he left behind before stalking back across the yard and leaving it behind all over again?

“Hey. You’ve got that serial killer look," Kageyama insists, propping his feet on Kei’s bed.

“That’s just my face. Get your feet off my bed, you animal.”

He doesn’t. He tilts his head, eyes stuck to the wall beyond Kei.

“Hey,” he says. “You’ll have a couch at your apartment, right? Have you even found one yet?”

“We see our last one on Tuesday.”

“So if you don’t like this one, you’re fucked?”

Kei looks askance at him. “It will be fine. Good, even.”

Kei’s phone buzzes its excitement, rattling on his desk. Kageyama tosses it to him.

“You sound optimistic. It’s weird.”

The bareness of his room is different this time. It’s different from when his things were moving to the toothpick house. This time, they fit more easily into their boxes. They don’t rattle around anxiously in the middle of the night. They sit patiently, snoozing dreamily, cozy with their future in someplace new, someplace untainted by floodwater and rage.

Kei opens his new message. Yamaguchi says he loves him.

“This apartment will be the one we get,” he tells Kageyama, his phone heavy in his hand. “It’s cheap. We won’t need roommates. It’s nice. It’s central and it has a balcony. I don’t know. There’s something about it. I’m inclined to choose it. I don’t know.”

Kageyama stares at him for a moment.

“My mom says to always trust your gut instinct with stuff like that,” he replies.

Kei nods. Kageyama nods back.

“Why don’t you use it?” he asks, nudging the brown envelope with his foot. “The money? I mean, it’s still money. Even if it’s asshole money.”

“Thanks for the visual.”

Kageyama coughs a dry laugh. “Seriously. Just keep it.”

“My name is on the envelope, but it just isn’t mine. I don’t know how else to say it.”

He blinks at Kei. His hands rest half-cupped in his lap like he started digging for something but gave up before he even hit subsoil, suddenly wary of what might lie underneath. Finally, he moves his feet off Kei’s bed to rest on the nearest cardboard box. More hollow than the others, Kageyama’s heels sink slightly into the top flaps, stretching the tape.

“Well,” he decides, “I would keep it.”

“For what?” Kei wonders.

“Food. Stuff. Tuition.”

“You don’t have tuition yet.”

“I know, I’m just saying. You could use it to buy a nice-ass couch for that apartment.”

“Why are you so fixated on the couch?”

“Because,” Kageyama answers, swiveling back and forth in the desk chair, not looking at Kei. He sweeps a piece of fuzz off his pants. “Where else am I gonna sleep when I come over?”

Something warm weighs instantly on Kei, like someone has draped a coat over his shoulders.

“Oh. Yeah. We’ll have a couch,” he promises.

“Where else would I sleep? On the floor like a dog?”

Kei grins. “Yes.”

“Shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“You first,” barks Kageyama, but he grins back all the same.

________________

  
Tsuru takes Yamaguchi’s position at Shimada Mart. Kei almost laughs.

“ _What_?”

“Well, I mean, since she's sticking around here.”

Yamaguchi wears his apron the entire way home. It flaps against his thighs as he walks and Kei wants him to take it off; it’s rubbing the back of his neck raw and his shirt collar is too low to cover it. But Kei can’t because it’s his last time, the last time he will wear it, so he lets it rub a rash into Yamaguchi’s skin just once more before he hands the sorry fabric over to his sister. Kei pulls his collar up three times.

“I think it’s romantic.”

“What is?”

“That Tsuru is staying here until next year. Until Hiroji graduates,” Yamaguchi insists. They sit on his front porch, the cement warm from drinking in the afternoon sun. The birdbath glares at Kei. He steadily ignores it. “Because she doesn’t want to move on without him, you know? It shows how devoted she is. It’s nice.”

Of course. Devotion is in their blood; Yamaguchi, his sister, his father. For Tsuru’s many faults, the same stubborn devotion zigzags through her as it does Yamaguchi. As it does their father. A streak of gold through crimson red, twisting around their veins, hugging them tight. Locking their arms around what they love completely, unconditionally, unabashedly. Yamaguchi’s leg brushes his. Kei pulls in an easy breath.

What if they were a year apart, like Tsuru and her boyfriend? Would Yamaguchi wait around for him? Would he spend that time in his half-empty house, floored by its silence when his siblings were with their mother an exact twenty-three-minute walk away? Will they tell Yamaguchi in hushed voices about the weird shit Kei’s father does; about the time Misashi inevitably found him on the kitchen floor at midnight, scrubbing ruts into the wood with steel wool, forgetting it wasn’t marble? Would Yamaguchi hold in his laugh, or would he bristle? Would he go to work at Shimada Mart—his shifts extended since he’d graduated—and take his breaks in time to walk Kei home from practice? Would they have ever met at all?

Watching him, Yamaguchi says, “I’d stick around if you graduated after me, Tsukki.”

“Great. I love older men.”

His laugh is slow acting. It bubbles up his throat and shakes his shoulder against Kei’s.

“I’m glad Tsuru is staying,” he admits once he’s recovered.

“Because of your dad?” Kei asks.

Yamaguchi nods. “I think it would be a lot for all of us to leave at once. I mean, not like my brothers are leaving, or Fumika.” A dandelion spore floats past, landing lightly on his knee, latching to the denim there. “They’ll be with him. Like, seventy percent of the time, they’ll be with him. In their old rooms and stuff. Except now they’ll have to wake Tsuru up at dawn to refill the neon foam darts in their little plastic guns instead of me.”

Gently, he pinches the spore between his fingers. Kei holds out his hand and Yamaguchi places it on his palm. Kei bends his fingers like a cage, keeping it there when the breeze tries to take it away.

“We won’t be too far. Not at all.”

He will be damned if he lets this meager distance drive a wedge between Yamaguchi and his siblings like it had with him and Akiteru.

“Yeah. I know.”

“They’ll miss you here. Terribly,” he tells Yamaguchi.

Even Yamaguchi’s house will miss him. The floors will miss his slight steps, will miss the creak they make where the old wood of the hallway meets the refurbished wood of the bathroom. The walls will miss the bounce-and-echo of his voice. The doorknobs will miss his grip. Even the kitchen table will miss the weight of his dinner plate. Kei overturns his hand and the dandelion spore floats on. His knee digs into Yamaguchi’s leg when he turns and takes his face in his hands. Kei kisses him, the lightest press for the longest moment, and the heat of Yamaguchi’s instant blush seeps into his palms. Kei lets him go. He draws back.

“But I have no doubt that I would miss you so much more,” he finishes.

Yamaguchi stares at him, his eyes huge and shiny. He blinks when the front door bangs open.

“Is this what you guys do now?” barks Tsuru. “Make out on the porch?”

Kei draws further back and adjusts his glasses where they’d slipped down his nose.

“We were hardly making out.”

“But we could if you want,” chirps Yamaguchi.

“As if. Gimme your apron, Tadashi. I’ve got  _training._ ”

He reaches around and unties the strings around his back, lifting the apron over his head. Yamaguchi hands it to his sister. Kei glances at the streak of red on his neck. It looks like it holds heat. Would it be warm if he pressed his fingers to it? Tsuru stuffs the apron in her bag to wrinkle. She squints against the setting sun, tucking her curly hair behind her ear.

“Shimada-san said I don’t really have to wear it yet,” she discloses, ruffling through her bag for a moment before she zips it up. “But I wanted to feel official for my last day of training.”

“Good luck. Don’t crack under pressure.”

“I’m gonna crack your face with my fist, Tsukishima.”

“Don’t be a dick,” scolds Yamaguchi.

“But it’s so natural for her,” Kei counters.

“It’s natural for both of you. You’re lucky I love you guys anyway.”

Kei and Tsuru share a glance. Quickly, discretely, they nod their agreement.

________________

  
The last apartment is in a perfect location, which is what Kei’s mother says is most important. Kei argues that it’s the rent. His mother pats his back and insists that while it’s her who’s paying it up front and then some, she at least has the authority to prioritize the way she thinks is best. Kei doesn’t press the issue. She’s probably right, anyway.

A campus map crinkles in Akiteru’s hand, one he printed out himself, and he is so proud to have answers when Yamaguchi asks him about old brick buildings and new, renovated dormitories. The structures are sparse but tall. Kei grows to match them as they walk, impossibly grand, snapping the buildings from the ground and holding them in his hands—his now. The sun blazes with approval. Yamaguchi blazes just the same at his side, just as warm and just as bright as he looks up at Kei, squinting against the sunlight.

“It’s hot,” he chirps.

“I know.”

“Hot like you, Tsukki.”

“Fifteen million degrees?” Kei wonders.

Yamaguchi’s stare darts upward. It darts back.

“Hotter,” he decides.

The street that holds the apartment juts out from the east side of campus. Akiteru leads them there without a map this time, following signs instead; huge signs that adorn the sides of buildings, their letters gold but unpolished, small signs erected from patches of green grass, black and white signs printed on flimsy poster board at local print shops; student-made signs. The widest walkway cuts straight through campus, lined with flowers and shrubbery and skinny trees. The pavement is streaked with white and black from scuffing sneakers, briefcase wheels, illegal skateboards. Wide enough for rivers of rushing students. Wide enough for parades. Wide enough for Kei and Yamaguchi to pass one another and not even know. Except they would know.

“Akiteru, can you stand here for a sec?”

“For what?” Akiteru asks, but waits where Yamaguchi points anyway.

“Okay, ready?”

Yamaguchi shakes the skinny tree with vigor and gingko leaves scatter the walkway. They rain over Akiteru and Yamaguchi leaps to his side to catch some too, reaching out and plucking one in particular from Kei’s shoulder to roll its stem between his fingers, the leaf twitching and twirling, watching the others sail to the ground and for a moment, Kei forgets that where they stand isn’t Yamaguchi’s first choice but his second, and for the first time, Kei feels something other than guilty about it: grateful.

He is so fucking grateful.

Kei is invincible as they climb the stairs to the apartment, like it could be submerged in four feet of water and he would still claim it instantly, flopping onto the waterlogged bed to nest with Yamaguchi until classes start. The man who ushers them inside is casual. He is laid-back and slouching—nothing like The Professional. Kei takes this as a good sign. Akiteru rushes the man with questions about appliances and rent and Yamaguchi leans into Kei’s shoulder.

“No emeralds,” he whispers.

“No peridots,” Kei whispers back.

“Can you feel that?”

Yamaguchi pulls him through the room and Kei doesn’t have to ask him what, because he _can_ , he can feel it: the weight of the air, dense from holding so much possibility, each molecule vibrating with light and sound and future. It isn’t until he swings the balcony door open, a summer breeze slipping through and tugging on their clothes, that Yamaguchi tells him. 

“Kei,” he says, his voice like ice on a sunburn, “I think this is our home.”

There is no backyard, no koi pond, no lap pool. There are no bay windows. What looks like hardwood is actually laminate. There is no chandelier over the kitchen table because there is no kitchen table. There is no record player, no bistro table meant for outside. There is no front porch. There is no birdbath, no winking key hiding underneath. There is no marble. It is exceptionally unexceptional, this home of theirs.

They will make it their own. They will move their stuff in and disagree about where it all should go. They will leave the television on for background noise as they cook in the kitchen. They will eat on the couch because they can. They will leave the bedroom door open when they have sex and buy plants for the balcony, whatever they want, and then they will buy a watering can to keep them alive. They will find the train station when they can't afford gas. They will memorize the walk there and back. They will go to Yamaguchi’s house when Fumika turns eleven, when Isao turns seven, when Misashi turns thirteen. They will go to Kei’s when his mother insists. They will listen to old music on her new record player and talk about how much better it sounds than Kei’s father’s. The memory won’t sting. They will visit Akiteru on long weekends. They will sleep on his tiny couch, both of them crammed into the scratchy cushions, their chests pressed together. They will feel each other's hearts beat in their fingertips.

Akiteru assails The Unprofessional in the kitchen with a flurry of questions as Kei and Yamaguchi walk to the bedroom. It’s shoved to the back corner of the apartment, hidden behind a thin door. Yamaguchi pushes it open. Natural light floods the room, seeping into the carpet, glowing off bare white walls. The single window catches all the sunlight of afternoon, even with its blinds tilted shut. Kei stills. He grabs Yamaguchi’s sleeve. The fabric stretches in his urgent grip.

“Yamaguchi. Look.”

Their gazes slide up the wall, to the bedroom window. They laugh themselves breathless.

A jagged crack runs right up the glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finishing this seems so surreal. this is the longest i've ever spent writing anything, over 6 months, and to see it come to an end today is really hard but also really cool and rewarding, oh my god. in terms of depth and dedication, if campfire in your chest was a puddle, the certain things we lack is a lake. there is so much more of myself in this fic than i ever thought possible. i've grown so attached to this little world and to bring it to a close right alongside you guys is amazing. you rock! you rock so hard!
> 
> if you want, you can listen to the [tctwl 8tracks playlist](https://8tracks.com/deanpendragon/the-certain-things-we-lack), or say hi on [tumblr](http://deanpendragon.tumblr.com/).
> 
> thank you, thank you, thank you for reading. <3


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